A collision of two supermassive black holes in a far-off galaxy originally predicted by a team of Caltech astronomers last year is not only going to happen, but could even be taking place sooner than originally anticipated, new research led by Columbia University has discovered.
According to CNET and the New York Times, the two enormous and distant regions of spacetime are on a collision course with one another, and while they may be in a galaxy located roughly 3.5 billion light-years away, their impact is expected to release over 100 quintillion Earths filled with TNT – and the new study has moved up the timetable for this cosmic car wreck.
Previous observations have revealed that these black holes are spiraling around each other in slow-motion at a distance of just one-light week. Writing last Wednesday in the journal Nature, the authors reported that their calculations predict that the event will occur in just 100,000 years, not in more than a million years as had been previously predicted.
The good news is that this slow-motion collision is taking place in the Virgo constellation, and the impact is unlikely to have an impact on our solar system. However, the collision will likely result in the destruction of the galaxy, creating gravitational waves (violent ripples in space-time) strong enough to fling stars out of the galaxy and send ripples throughout the universe.
Black holes are closer than previously thought
Lead author Daniel D’Orazio and his colleagues found that the majority of the light being given off by the quasar at the center of the galaxy, PG 1302-102, was coming from a large disc of gas surrounding the smaller of the two black holes. As it and its larger companion travel around one another at high speeds, that light will be enhanced through a Doppler boost.
A Doppler boost is a series of relativistic effect similar in nature to the way in which a noisy siren grows louder and higher in pitch as it draws nearer. As a result, the galaxy would appear brighter every five years, and the Columbia astronomers used both the Hubble and Galex telescopes to find that this variation is up to three times larger in ultraviolet light.
Using this data, they developed a model suggesting that the two black holes are actually orbiting each other at a distance of just 200 billion miles, or less than one-tenth of a light-year. At such a distance, the black holes would be rapidly losing energy by radiating gravitational waves, which means that they could collide in as little as 100,000 years, depending upon their masses.
“This is the closest we’ve come to observing two black holes on their way to a massive collision,” senior author Zoltan Haiman said, according to CNET.
“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.”
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Feature Image: P. Marenfeld/NOAO/AURA/NSF
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