Astrophysicist Marko Micic leads discovery of black hole pairs

A research team led by Serbian astrophysicist Marko Micic from the University of Alabama has discovered two pairs of massive black holes located within distant dwarf galaxies. The discovery was made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the WISE infrared space telescope, and the Canada-France-Hawaii optical telescope.

The first pair is situated in the Abel 133 galaxy cluster, approximately 760 million light-years from Earth. This system, named Mirabilis, is in the final stages of a merger between two dwarf galaxies, a process that has created a long tail of matter due to tidal forces.

The second pair is located in the Abel 1758S cluster, roughly 3.2 billion light-years away. This system is in an earlier stage of merging, characterized by a visible bridge of stars and cosmic gas between the two galaxies, which have been named Elstir and Vintej.