“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….
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 that separating our sun and Pluto, NASA said. The two black holes are more than 99% of the way toward colliding, the agency said….
This is only the second pair of orbiting black holes identified by scientists, the researchers say. Space-time undulations from gravitational waves made by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were recorded in 2015 by the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
