A recent paper published in the journal Nature stated that an international team of astronomers announced the discovery of the fifth known triple supermassive black hole system in the universe.

The system is named SDSS J150243.09+111557.3. It was detected by an array of distantly spaced radio-telescopes by using a technique called baseline interferometry or VLBI.

Blackholes are believed to be at the centre of every galaxy and a super massive blackhole that is detected is 1 million to 10 billion times more massive than our sun. This particular supermassive blackhole was discovered after searching just six likely candidate galaxies.

Further describing the discovery it is said that in case of J1502+1115, there are two closest black holes separated by a distance of 140 parsces (one parsec equals about 19 trillion miles) and the third supermassive black hole is much farther away. All of them eject enormous streams of matter in so-called jets. This jet of the first distant black hole is straight and that of the other two closest black holes is twisted into a helical pattern due to the orbital motion.

Roger Deane is a researcher at Cape Town University in South Africa. He is the lead author of this study. He said that black holes are orbiting one another at 300 times the speed of sound on Earth.

This particular triple supermassive black hole discovery is significant because it will let scientists understand better how a galaxy evolves and how frequently black holes merge as right now not much is known about closely packed black holes.