A team of Caltech Astronomers have discovered a pair of
super massive black-hole about 3.5 billion years away from us, pirouetting
inside the Virgo constellation, that are so close together that a
universe-shaking collision could be imminent, reports the New York times.
The two black holes are in a fatal gravitational dance less
than 200 billion miles apart, which is practically kissing in the scale of the
universe. By our terms, their distance from one another is about the same
distance between the sun and the Oort Cloud. It’s the closest that astronomers
have ever come to witnessing the merger of two black holes of this size.
The theoretical effect of such collision is difficult to comprehend.
It could release as much energy as 100 millions supernova explosion, and send
shock waves through the fabric of space-time itself.
This event won’t happen in our lifetimes, it is scheduled to
occur in about 100000 years. But the conditions surrounding the event would
give scientists opportunity to test some theories about the universe;
predictions can only be tested by extreme conditions like this.
“A scientific theory is only as good as the tests which it
passed,” Said Daniel D’Orazio of Columbia University, in an email to the New
York Times. Although general relativity has passed all the observational and
experiments test thrown at it so far, some predictions can only tested in the
most extreme gravitational environments, black holes.
The discovery was made after researchers caught a glimpse of
a quasar known as PG 1302-102, which was flickering like an emergency beacon in
a pattern that was bets explained by the merging two black holes.
Super-massive black holes can be found at the centers of almost
all galaxies, it’s believed. If such merging could occur in our milky way, then
our sun would be blow away, or destroyed.
Likewise, if there were ever any aliens living around any of
the stars in the system highlighted by the PG 1302-102, their extinction could
be nigh. It’s a perfect reminder of just how small and fragile we are in the
grand scheme of the Universe.
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