eso_eso2117b November 30th, 2021
Credit: ESO/Voggel et al.
Close-up view of the two bright galactic nuclei, each housing a supermassive black hole, in NGC 7727, a galaxy located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Each nucleus consists of a dense group of stars with a supermassive black hole at its centre. The two black holes are on a collision course and form the closest pair of supermassive black holes found to date. It is also the pair with the smallest separation between two supermassive black holes — observed just 1600 light-years apart in the sky. The image was taken with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Provider: European Southern Observatory
Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2117b/
Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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