TWO PAIRS OF BLACK HOLES FOUND BY TEAM LED BY SERBIAN ASTROPHYSICIST

BELGRADE, OCTOBER 14 /SRNA/ - Serbian astrophysicist Marko Mićić of the University of Alabama led a research team that discovered two pairs of massive black holes in merging dwarf galaxies, a finding that could help scientists better understand the evolution of the universe and the formation of large galaxies.

One pair of black holes, named "Mirabilis," is located in the galaxy cluster Abell 133, about 760 million light-years from Earth, while the other is in galaxies called "Elstir" and "Vinteuil" in the Abell 1758S cluster, roughly 3.2 billion light-years away. The first pair was named after an endangered hummingbird species known for its long tail, while the second is at an earlier stage of merging, in two galaxies linked by a visible bridge of stars and cosmic gas. The galaxies were named "Elstir" and "Vinteuil" after characters from French writer Marcel Proust's novel "In Search of Lost Time." The research led by Mićić used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the WISE infrared telescope and optical observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Scientists said studying these systems could help shed light on the formation of the first galaxies, the evolution of black holes and star formation during galactic collisions, Sputnik reported. According to their estimates, dwarf galaxies in the early universe gradually merged and grew, contributing to the formation of larger galactic structures such as the Milky Way.