In 10,000 years, according to a new research, two supermassive black holes will collide, sending ripples across the cosmos.
A team of astronomers from the California Institute of
Technology discovered that two supermassive black holes around 9 billion
light-years distant in deep space orbit each other every two years.
Each supermassive black hole is thought to have mass
hundreds of millions of times greater than the Sun.
The distance between the bodies is nearly fifty times that
between our sun and Pluto. When the pair collides in around 10,000 years, it is
expected that the gigantic impact would rock space and time itself, spreading
gravitational waves across the cosmos.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters released the paper titled
The Unexpected Phenomenology of the Blazar PKS 2131–021: A Unique Supermassive black
Hole Binaridate.
A team of astronomers from the California Institute of
Technology has found evidence of this scenario occurring inside a quasar, a
very powerful object. A quasar is an exceptionally luminous active galactic
nucleus that is driven by black holes millions or billions of times more
massive than the sun
PKS 2131-021, the quasar discovered in the current research,
belongs to a subgroup of quasars known as blazars in which the jet is directed
at Earth. Astronomers previously knew that quasars may contain two supermassive
black holes in orbit, but finding concrete evidence for this has been challenging.
The researchers contend that PKS 2131-021, which has been
studied for more than 45 years, is now the second known quasar containing two
supermassive black holes that are about to collide.
The earliest known quasar is designated OJ 287, and it
contains two black holes that orbit each other every nine years but are farther
away.