Possible pair of primordial supermassive black holes identified
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a study on a double X-ray source in the early universe cataloged as MG B2016+112 which could be composed of two supermassive black holes whose image is distorted by a gravitational lens. Cristiana Spingola, Daniel Schwartz, and Anna Barnacka started from a survey obtained by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to examine the double object observed. This is an unprecedented situation because from the Earth we see it as it was when the universe was about two billion years old with the two components separated by only 650 light-years. At present, it cannot be ruled out that it’s a single supermassive black hole and one of its jets of materials whose image was strongly distorted by the gravitational lens.
