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Is Universe-Shaking Black-Hole collision coming sooner than thought?




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. 


Ed Tesla

Ed Tesla

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