{"id":238039,"date":"2026-05-30T03:33:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T08:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/a-hidden-supermassive-black-hole-may-be-lurking-inside-the-antennae-galaxies"},"modified":"2026-05-30T03:33:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T08:33:00","slug":"a-hidden-supermassive-black-hole-may-be-lurking-inside-the-antennae-galaxies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/a-hidden-supermassive-black-hole-may-be-lurking-inside-the-antennae-galaxies","title":{"rendered":"A hidden supermassive black hole may be lurking inside the Antennae galaxies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-hidden-supermassive-black-hole-may-be-lurking-inside-the-antennae-galaxies2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers may have uncovered a hidden supermassive black hole inside the famous Antennae galaxies NGC 4038\/4039, a pair of colliding galaxies best known for their spectacular bursts of star formation. The paper outlining the findings was posted to the <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.21879v1\" target=\"_blank\"><i>arXiv<\/i><\/a> preprint server on May 21.<\/p>\n<p>The Antennae galaxies are a pair of colliding spirals located roughly 70 million light-years from Earth, making them the nearest example of two gas-rich galaxies merging. The system is also one of the youngest of its kind. The two merging galaxies are called Antennae galaxies because the collision has stripped out long tails of stars, gas, and dust from them, resembling an insect\u2019s antennae. The interaction has triggered one of the most intense bursts of star formation seen in the local universe, making the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-09-growth-baby-galaxies-witnessed-james.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">Antennae<\/a> a widely used laboratory for studying how galaxies grow through interactions.<\/p>\n<p>Galaxy mergers are known to do more than just ignite star formation. The gravitational disruption they cause can <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-01-supermassive-fuel-hungry-black-holes-intergalactic.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">funnel gas<\/a> toward galactic centers and trigger the supermassive black holes residing there to accrete, turning into an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The Antennae, however, only showed a spectrum dominated by starburst activity so far, with no indication that either black hole was actively feeding. A previous study analyzing the massive star clusters in the merging system, however, found some changes in the brightness near the core of one of the galaxies. Astronomers are now curious to know if this has anything to do with the AGN activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers may have uncovered a hidden supermassive black hole inside the famous Antennae galaxies NGC 4038\/4039, a pair of colliding galaxies best known for their spectacular bursts of star formation. The paper outlining the findings was posted to the arXiv preprint server on May 21. The Antennae galaxies are a pair of colliding spirals located [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}