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The Mystery of How Supermassive Black Holes Merge
The giant holes in galaxies’ centers shouldn’t be able to combine, yet combine they do. Scientists suggest that an unusual form of dark matter may be the solution.
Last year, observations of the subtle movements of pulsating stars known as a pulsar timing array revealed a background hum of gravitational waves in the universe—ripples in the fabric of space-time. 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 coauthor 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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