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 lack 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.
Reference(s): Peer-Reviewed Research, EurekaAlert, Caltech
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