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.
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