Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes that are 99 percent on their way to colliding violently, causing the fabric of space-time to be shattered.
According to a study published Feb. 23 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the black holes, which share the moniker PKS 2131-021, are locked in a doomsday dance around 9 billion light-years from Earth. According to NASA, the two objects have been progressively moving toward each other for roughly 100 million years and currently share a binary orbit, with the two black holes round each other every two years or so.
The two black holes will combine in about 10,000 years, sending gravitational waves — vibrations in the fabric of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein — crashing across the universe, according to the researchers. Despite the fact that none of us will be present for the epic crash, examining PKS 2131-021 now could offer new facts about how supermassive black holes emerge and what happens when two clash.
PKS 2131-021 is a form of black hole known as a blazar, which is essentially a supermassive black hole directing a jet of supercharged matter right at Earth. That stuff comes from the hot gas rings that form around black holes; when the black hole's enormous gravity pulls that gas in, some of it may escape and be pushed away in a jet of plasma moving at almost the speed of light.
The authors of the new study were monitoring the brightness of about 1,800 blazars scattered throughout the universe when they noticed something unusual: the brightness of blazar PKS 2131-021 fluctuated at regular intervals, so predictably that the fluctuations were compared to the ticking of a clock by the study authors.
The researchers assumed that the changes were caused by a second black hole pushing on the first as the two objects orbited each other every two years or so, but additional data was needed to see how long this pattern lasted. As a result, the researchers went through 45 years of data from five observatories. The team's expectations for how the binary blazar's brightness should fluctuate over time were confirmed by the extra data.
PKS 2131-021 would be the second pair of binary black holes ever detected, and the tightest-knit pair ever discovered, if the findings are validated. In 2020, scientists in a galaxy roughly 3.5 billion light-years from Earth uncovered the universe's first known black hole binary contender. Those black holes, on the other hand, orbit each other every nine years, implying a significantly wider distance between them than the two members of PKS 2131-021.
The two gigantic black holes are huge enough and near enough together that they could generate gravitational waves before colliding, according to the study's authors. PKS 2131-021's future observations will focus on catching those waves in the act.
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