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A Black Hole Emitting Some Light
Two supermassive black holes are “dancing”, drawn together by each other’s humongous gravitational attraction, set for a collision that will likely send ripples through the very fabric of space-time.
Astrophysicists from Columbia University are saying that two closely orbiting supermassive black holes, which reside within the Virgo constellation, are much closer than they had previously thought. Only a “light week” apart (about 3.5 billion light years away from Earth), the scientist now warn that this collision will occur within the next 100,000 years.
As you probably know by now, black holes are anything but empty – rather quite the opposite. Black holes are the most packed matter we know of, with so much mass that even light can’t escape them. Supermassive black holes are, as the name suggests, very massive black hole. How massive? Well, as beautifully portrayed here, they can be millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun – while being smaller than Pluto; it’s thought that most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center. Astrophysicists have often asked themselves what would happen if two black holes were to collide (or merge), and they might finally get their answer thanks to a bleeping light..
The pair of black holes is located 3.5 billion light-years away, deep in the Virgo constellation, separated by a mere light-week. The previous closest black hole pair found was 20 light years away in comparison.
“This is the closest we’ve come to observing two black holes on their way to a massive collision,” said the study’s senior author, Zoltan Haiman, an astronomer at Columbia. “Watching this process reach its culmination can tell us whether black holes and galaxies grow at the same rate, and ultimately test a fundamental property of space-time: its ability to carry vibrations called gravitational waves, produced in the last, most violent, stage of the merger.”
The light isn’t coming from the pair itself, but rather from the turbulence around them.
Interestingly, it’s not the bigger, but the smaller black hole that’s bleeping the strongest. This happens because the smaller one is less able to throw around interstellar dust, which means that more gas ends up drifting close to it – and it’s this gas that gives off the bright glow.