If light can't escape a black hole then how did the scientists find out its shape ?
Answers
The larger of the pair is estimated to be 150 million times more massive than our sun, while the puny companion is only four million times the mass of the sun. In a few hundred thousand years, the two will spiral into each other, resulting in what we can only guess would be the end of the universe. (Kidding!)
The team, based partly in the U.S. and partly in China, thinks the binary formed when the two galaxies merged. The merger seems to have been good for the star-forming business: Mrk 231 births stars at a rate that is 100 times greater than our Milky Way.
“We are extremely excited about this finding because it not only shows the existence of a close binary black hole in Mrk 231, but also paves a new way to systematically search binary black holes via the nature of their ultraviolet light emission,” press release.