Astronomers have discovered two massive supermassive black holes on their way to colliding, which could create a violent collision that will shake the fabric of space-time. The estimated time of impact is about 10,000 years from now, from 2022.
The black holes that share the same name, PKS 2131-021, currently exist in a region of space about 9 billion light-years from Earth. According to a statement from NASA, these two ‘monster’ black holes have been moving steadily towards each other for about 100 million years. They are now sharing binary orbits that orbit each other every two years.
A special merger event of the universe when two supermassive black holes come close to each other.
In about 10,000 years, the researchers say, these two black holes will merge into one, creating a ‘unique’ event that spreads across the universe gravitational waves – ripples in the structure space-time structure that physicist Albert Einstein had predicted before.
Although none of us will witness that terrifying collision, the study of PKS 2131-021 can now reveal new information about how supermassive black holes form and what happens when the two supermassive black holes form. of them collide.
Black holes are considered as “gluttonous monsters” of the universe.
Black holes orbit each other, while the larger black hole blasts a jet of matter into space, allowing astronomers to detect it from Earth. These supermassive black holes are extremely dark, dense objects that are hundreds of millions of times more massive than the Sun.
Astronomers don’t know how these objects get to be so large, but there’s a possibility that the universe’s largest black holes were created by the mergers between black holes themselves. less.
If the findings are confirmed, PKS 2131-021 would be the second pair of binary black holes ever discovered and the most closely related pair that scientists have found.
Scientists discovered the first binary black hole in 2020 in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. However, those black holes orbit each other every nine years, indicating that there is a much larger distance between them than the distance between the two black holes PKS 2131-021.
Two “monster” black holes are large enough and close enough that they can generate gravitational waves before colliding with each other. Future observations of the pair of black holes PKS 2131-021 will focus on capturing this gravitational waveform.