It just keeps getting stranger...

[kayshapero]

Found! Trio of Huge Black Holes in Distant Galaxy's Core

Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor   |   June 25, 2014 01:01pm ET

Scientists have just discovered a distant galaxy with not one but three supermassive black holes at its core.

The new finding suggests that tight-knit groups of these giant black holes are far more common than previously thought, and it potentially reveals a new way to easily detect them, researchers say. Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun are thought to lurk at the hearts of virtually every large galaxy in the universe.

Most galaxies have just one supermassive black hole at their center. However, galaxies evolve through merging, and merged galaxies can sometimes possess multiple supermassive black holes.

Astronomers observed a galaxy with the alphabet soup name of SDSS J150243.09+111557.3, which they suspected might have a pair of supermassive black holes. It lies about 4.2 billion light-years away from Earth, about "one-third of the way across the universe," said lead study author Roger Deane, a radio astronomer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
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