Astronomers find heaviest black hole pair in the universe, and they’ve been trapped in an endless duel for 3 billion years

Astronomers have spotted the heaviest black hole pair ever seen — a duo weighing the equivalent of 28 billion suns. The black holes' combined mass is so great that they refuse to collide and merge.

"Normally it seems that galaxies with lighter black hole pairs have enough stars and mass to drive the two together quickly," co-author Roger Romani, a physics professor at Stanford University, said in a statement."Since this pair is so heavy it required lots of stars and gas to get the job done. But the binary has scoured the central galaxy of such matter, leaving it stalled."

To find a pair of near-merging black holes, the astronomers scoured archival data collected by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Using the telescope's spectrograph to break light from stars into distinct colors, the scientists found light that had originated from suns accelerating around the black holes.

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Astronomers find monster black hole devouring a sun's-worth of matter every dayBen Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
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