Double Trouble

What looks like a couple of sunny-side-up eggs is really a pair of merging galaxies, each with its own bright heart. And recent observations by two space-based X-ray telescopes show that each of those bright hearts contains a supermassive black hole. The system is known as NGC 3758, and it's about 425 million light-years away. Each of the black holes is millions of times more massive than the Sun, and is encircled by a large disk of superhot gas that is radiating extreme amounts of X-rays. The two black holes are separated by just 11,000 light-years, which is less than half the distance from our solar system to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. [SDSS]