Triple black hole

[alokmohan]

SPACE.com) -- The discovery of three distant supermassive black holes in proximity to one another is giving astronomers a glimpse into the chaotic early years of the universe.<br /><br />Known as quasars, these incredibly bright objects are thought to be powered by gas falling into enormous black holes situated in the centers of galaxies. Although smaller than our solar system, a single quasar can outshine an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars.<br /><br />Roughly 100,000 quasars have been observed in recent years, some of them double quasars. But this is the first time that three quasars have been found so near one another. The three quasars are separated by about 100,000 to 150,000 light years -- about the width of our Milky Way.<br /><br />"Quasars are extremely rare objects. To find two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space," said study leader George Djorgovski, an astronomer at Caltech. "To find three is unprecedented."<br /><br />The discovery, made using the European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory Hawaii, was reported here today at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. A science paper on the research has been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters.<br /><br />One of the quasars in the triplet, called LBQS 1429-008, was discovered in 1989 by a team of astronomers led by Paul Hewett of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England.<br /><br />Hewett's team later spotted what appeared to be a faint companion to their quasar, but they dismissed it as a visual illusion created by gravitational lensing, whereby light traveling towards Earth from distant galaxies is bent by the gravity of massive objects -- such as star clusters, dark matter clumps or other galaxies -- in their path. Sometimes, this can create mirror images of a galaxy in one or more different places in the sky.<br /><br />But the new observations have revealed a third, even fainter companion to H