Two incredibly close black holes will merge into spacetime and spacetime »Science News

In about 10,000 years, the merger will produce gravitational waves propagating through space.

An unusual discovery was made by a team of astronomers who identified two supermassive black holes Which is about to merge into an event so violent that it is able to shake the fabric of spacetime. A pair of black holes, named after PKS 2131-021, about 9 billion light-years from our location, as determined in research published February 23 in the astrophysical journal Letters. The two bodies were close to each other for about 100 million years until they orbited each other in a binary system. In about 10,000 years the two black holes will merge, producing gravitational waves, or spacetime ripples. A phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein in the past. Despite the numerous discoveries of supermassive black holes, which experts believe are at the center of most galaxies, scientists still do not know how these objects reach such large sizes, but one possibility is that black holes evolve from one or more galaxies. Between two small black holes. PKS 2131-021 is a special class of black holes known as plazaar, or a supermassive black hole that shoots jets of matter into space. This matter arises from the rings of hot gas that form around some black holes: when a black hole attracts this gas with its strong gravity, some of the matter can escape, rather than being pushed away in a rapidly traveling jet of plasma. of light.

Experts have been observing the brightness almost 1800 blazer scattered across the universe when they spotted something extraordinary: Blazar PKS 2131-021’s brightness fluctuated at regular intervals, so experts are expected to compare the fluctuations with the ticking of a clock. Experts were skeptical of the fact that fluctuations they were The result of another black hole pulling the first as the two bodies orbit each other to complete a circle in about two years or so, but more information was needed to determine the duration of this cycle. So the researchers looked at data from five observers over a 45-year period. All of the data bolstered experts’ predictions of how the binary blazar’s brightness will change over time. If confirmed, PKS 2131-021 will be the second closest pair of black holes ever discovered.

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