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Newly Discovered ‘Infinity Galaxy’ Could Prove How Ancient Supermassive Black Holes Formed


This collision of two galaxies could demonstrate that theorized “direct collapse black holes” exist.

Because of this resemblance, the researchers—who are based at the universities of Yale and Copenhagen—have nicknamed it the “Infinity Galaxy” and have detailed their discovery in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then collapsed into a black hole,” Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale and a coauthor on the paper, said in a post on his university’s website. “While such collisions are rare events, similarly extreme gas densities are thought to have been quite common in the earliest cosmic epochs, when galaxies began to form,” Van Dokkum added.

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