Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The stage has been set for a explosion of apocalyptic proportions, as two distant supermassive black holes just one light-year apart are on a collision course that could result in the destruction of their home galaxy and release as much energy as 100 million supernovas.
According to Gizmodo, if researchers have their calculations right, the collision will take place withsin the next one million years – a relatively short time, astronomically speaking. Fortunately for humanity, the black holes are located in a remote galaxy known as PG 1302-102.
Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core, explained Time, and when two galaxies merge, their central black holes orbit each other and eventually begin to come closer together. When that happens, they should create gravitational waves, or ripples in the very fabric of space-time, but no such events have ever been witnessed by astronomers.
The two supermassive black holes that are the subject this latest study are orbiting each other more closely than any others ever observed, the website said. While most twin black holes are not expected to merge for a few billion years, the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday said that these black holes will collide in a fraction of that time.
S. George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues, who were responsible for the discovery, report that, cosmically speaking, the two supermassive black holes are essentially right on top of one another. For comparison sake, they are as close to each other as the Sun is to the Oort Cloud of comets are at the side of the edge of our Solar System.
Most of the energy, the New York Times explained, would go into the gravitational waves, but there could also be other “electromagnetic fireworks” produced as well. Dr. Djorgovski told the newspaper that the interactions of the black hole would also forcibly eject nearby stars.
Avi Loeb, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the research, told the Times that this was “the most convincing evidence for a tight pair of black holes with a separation smaller than the solar system.” However, he said that the evidence was not yet concrete and that an apparent variation in quasar light could be a statistical effect from checking it too infrequently.
However, if the research proves to be accurate, that would make the PG 1302-102 system could provide a wealth of information in the growing field of gravitational wave astronomy, the Times noted. It could also give scientists a sneak-peak as to what will happen in our own galaxy a few billion years down the road, when it ultimately collides with the nearby Andromeda galaxy.
“What the astronomers are hoping for now is to find more examples like this,” Time said. “They have some 20 candidates already, and the more twin black holes they can find that are in tight orbits, the better they can understand what’s really going on. We may not be around to see PG 1302-102’s final collision – if it ever takes place – but somewhere out there, two black holes may be even closer to tangling.”
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