In a galaxy far, far away, two giant black holes appear to be circling each other like fighters in a galactic boxing ring.
Gravity is causing this death spiral, which will result in a collision and formation of a single black hole, a massive event that will send ripples through space and time.
The collision itself happened eons ago — the two black holes are located about 9 billion light years from Earth. Scientists won’t be able to document it for 10,000 years. Even so, there are imperceptible gravitational waves generated before the collision that are hitting us right now.
These waves from the black holes’ activity will increase, but will not affect Earth. However, they could help increase our understanding of how our universe has evolved.
Such supermassive black holes “are the most powerful and energetic objects in the universe and they have an enormous effect on the evolution of galaxies and stars,” Tony Readhead, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. He is the co-author of the report by Caltech astronomers who detail the discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“If we want to understand the evolution of our universe we need to understand these objects,” Readhead said.
Black holes: Two will merge into one
Black holes are invisible spots in the galaxy where gravity pulls in all matter and light, according to NASA. Even though black holes are invisible, scientists can find them because they can study how stars near them behave differently.
Each of the black holes identified in this study has a mass amounting to hundreds of millions of times more than that of our sun, the researchers say. It took about 100 million years for the two objects to converge on their orbit, which has them at a distance of about 50 times…
