According to the theory of Einstein's general relativity, such a shock should release Monumental gravitational waves.
A massive explosion has not scheduled until within a hundred millennia could help astronomers to try one of the central theories of physics, according to one of the authors of a new article.
Two black holes in Virgo are directed to a "massive collision," said Zoltan Haiman, an astronomer at the University of Columbia, in a news release from Columbia published in Science Daily. Haiman is co-author of an article published in the journal Nature, which examined flashes from a quasar.
The flashes, according to Haiman and his coauthors, Daniel D'Orazio and David Schiminovich of Columbia, come from a pair of black holes orbiting each other in the quasar PG 1302-102, a distance of about 3,500 million light years. The two black holes are at a distance of about one or two weeks-light ... less than 322,000 million kilometers. That's much closer than the distance between the Earth and its next nearest star Proxima Centauri, which is more than 4 light years (38.6 billion kilometers) from our planet.
Ironically, considering that a light year is the distance light travels in a year, so astronomers are seeing PG 1302-102 actually occurred when life had just emerged on Earth.
In any case, Haiman and his colleagues believe that the two black holes collide in about 100,000 years, which is almost morning in cosmic time. Moreover, the holes are incredibly large: combined, they are the size of a billion suns, according to The New York Times.
Haiman, D'Orazio and Schiminovich were using basic research astronomers from Caltech, who initially noted that the two black holes were in a closed orbit rapidly spinning.
The implications are profound. Astronomers do not have to wait 100,000 years for the PG 1302-102 do its job; thanks to the knowledge gained in the study, including some ways to detect other pairs of black holes they can focus on other binary and hope to detect a collision in the next 10 years.
According to the theory of Einstein's general relativity, such a shock should release Monumental gravitational waves ... waves that have yet to be detected.
"The detection of gravitational waves allows us to probe the secrets of gravity and test Einstein's theory in the most extreme environment of our universe ... black holes," said D'Orazio, a graduate student at Columbia and senior author the study. "Getting there is a holy grail for our field."
