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How do merging supermassive black holes pass the final parsec?
The giant holes in galaxies’ centers shouldn’t be able to merge, yet merge they do. Scientists suggest that an unusual form of dark matter may be the solution.
Because self-interacting dark matter particles scatter off one another like billiard balls on a table, they would not be as easily dispersed and would instead pull at the black holes’ heels, slowing them down. These particles would also concentrate in the galactic center and experience friction with the black holes, allowing the fuzzy dark matter to “efficiently carry away their angular momentum and orbital energy,” said Jae-Weon Lee, a cosmologist at Jungwon University in South Korea and a co-author of a September paper in Physics Letters B describing the idea. “If you have a ton of these stars that get close to the central two supermassive black holes, then you can extract more and more angular momentum,” said Fabio Pacucci, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University.
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