Two black holes orbiting will collide strongly in the future

Astronomers from Caltech have discovered that two black holes, 9 billion light-years from Earth, are on the verge of a merger.

Predictive images of merging black holes.

Accordingly, the observations were made over the course of 13 years by astronomers at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in Northern California. They revealed that a previously observed radio black hole at its center, PKS 2131-021 - has a companion black hole. This makes it a super-large binary pit. Quasars are active galactic cores in which supermassive black holes suck material from an accretion disk.

As Caltech reports, two supermassive black holes orbit each other every two years. Each object in the massive space has a mass hundreds of millions of times more than our Sun, and they are separated by a distance about 50 times greater than the space between our Sun and Pluto. Their findings are published in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The two black holes are expected to merge in about 10,000 years (a short time on a cosmic scale) resulting in a violent collision that is thought to send cascaded gravitational waves through the universe. In fact, in November 2021, astronomers from the University of Colorado Boulder published their report following computer simulations of two black holes at the centers of two colliding galaxies. They claim that the collision could cause a "gravity kick" so powerful that it could distort the shape of a galaxy.

Astronomers have detected an intense jet stream emanating from the vicinity of black holes. The jet was observed shifting back and forth. This is an indication of the pair's orbital motion detected through periodic variations in the brightness of radio light emitted by black holes.

The researchers explain that their discovery will help better understand the violent processes capable of changing the shape of the entire galactic structure. From there, they better understand our galaxy's cannibal past.