'The beacons were lit!' Scientists name merging supermassive black holes after 'Lord of the Rings' locations

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"Rohan was first, for Rohan Shivakumar, the Yale student who first analyzed it, and Gondor was next, because, well — the beacons were lit!"

A screenshot from a simulation of colliding supermassive black holes
A screenshot from a simulation of colliding supermassive black holes. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018)

When the beacons were lit in "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the city of Gondor called to Rohan for aid, spelling doom for Sauron and his legions. However, when the beacons of supermassive black hole systems named for these locations in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels were lit up, it was exceptionally good news for scientists.

A screenshot from a simulation of colliding supermassive black holes

Supermassive black holes at the heart of merging galaxies will circle closer and closer until they come together, releasing a titanic wave of energy. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018)

That makes quasars beacons that can indicate the unification of supermassive black holes. If one of these beacons radiates gravitational waves like the lit beacons of Gondor, it indicates binary black holes are present. Thus, this detection technique offers scientists a method to create a cosmic map of these merging titans.

"Our finding provides the scientific community with the first concrete benchmarks for developing and testing detection protocols for individual, continuous gravitational wave sources," NANOGrav team member Chiara Mingarelli said in a statement.

Mingarelli and colleagues hunted for supermassive black hole binaries using their new approach in 114 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), the bright central regions of galaxies where supermassive black holes are ravenously feasting on surrounding gas and dust.

Mingarelli explained the reason for the unusual name choice for these black hole systems: "The names come from both people and pop culture. Rohan was first, for Rohan Shivakumar, the Yale student who first analyzed it, and Gondor was next, because, well — the beacons were lit!"

NANOGrav, which first detected a gravitational wave background in 2023, will spend the coming months hunting and identifying supermassive black hole binaries. The team thinks that even a relatively small catalog of black hole mergers could help create a gravitational wave background map. This research could also help scientists better understand galaxy mergers, the physics of black holes and the nature of gravitational waves themselves.

"Our work has laid out a roadmap for a systemic supermassive black hole binary detection framework," Mingarelli said. "We carried out a systematic, targeted search, developed a rigorous protocol — and two targets rose to the top as examples motivating follow-up."

The team's results were published on Feb. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Robert Lea
Robert Lea
Senior Writer

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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