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The discovery of the triple quasar made it clear that it's more than academic as well, Lousto told Discovery News. "The most likely event is to have two black holes merge," Lousto said. Next in line is the triple merger, then quadruple merger. Among the things discovered in the modeling of three is that the gravitational waves given off by the event are quite different than those waves created by two black holes. Four black holes merging will very likely have yet another gravitational wave signature, he said. Knowing these signatures in advance is expected to be very useful for identifying the sources of real gravitational waves -- when they are successfully detected. "This illustrates a great progress theorists are making in numerical modeling of black hole mergers," said astronomer George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology. He was one of the discoverers of the triple quasar last year. "Such processes must have played an important role in the co-evolution of galaxies and their central, super-massive black holes, especially in the first few billion years of the cosmic history." The trio of real quasars is about 10.5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. In other words, the light from the quasars was emitted from matter falling into the black holes when the universe was a tad more than 3 billion years old. Related Links : |
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