PG 1302-102: Supermassive black holes head for collision
While the Earth is going about its daily rotation, outer space is making headlines when a pair of supermassive black holes are found out to be heading for a cosmic collision. According to Yahoo! News, the collision will be so intense that it will send ripples racing through the fabric of space-time. Data was used from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and Hubble Space Telescope to come up with the confirmation.
It was early this year when the quasar PG 1302-102 was discovered through the use of ground-based telescopes. After progressive research and study, a team of astronomers from Columbia University had calculated its collision course more accurately now despite how extraordinarily complicated the formidable collisions are to detect. They say that the crash is expected any time between 20, 000 and 350, 000 years from now.
They published their study in the journal "Nature" wherein they provided information regarding the pair. They said that the two are presently spinning one another around 3.5 billion light years away from Earth, deep in the Virgo constellation. Previous report of the closest confirmed black hole pair is distanced away by 20 light-years.
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As said by senior author and Columbian astronomer Zoltan Haiman, this so far is the nearest they have come to observing two holes that are heading to a massive collision. Through this observation process, they are also able to determine whether black holes and galaxies expand at the same rate. He then added that this lead them to "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."
Through the results of their research, the astronomers will find it easy to comprehend how to search for even closer-knot merging black holes in the future. This will reportedly allow them to witness a crash within the next 10 years and even get to take a look at the gravitational waves foretold by Einstein in his general theory of relativity.
