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The universe will soon experience a phenomena unlike anything its ever seen, as two super massive black holes are about to collide.
Soon, though, is relatively speaking. Probably not tomorrow. Scientists currently estimate that the smaller black hole will be subsumed by the larger sometime in the next 100,000 years. Right now they are only a light week apart.
But here’s the crazy ish. It already happened. The black holes in question are 3.5 billion light years away. What we are observing happened right around the time the first single-celled organisms were appearing on Earth.
Scientists are still jacked about it, because if they do merge, and we are still around to observe it, the collision might produce gravitational waves, which are theoretical in nature, and have never be seen.
And it’ll be fucking wild. Via The New York Times:
Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.
Word up, because gravitational waves are one of the least understood forces in the universe. From Gizmodo:
Merging black holes wield some of the most powerful forces in the universe, and they may hold the key to observing the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago.
“The detection of gravitational waves lets us probe the secrets of gravity and test Einstein’s theory in the most extreme environment in our universe — black holes,” said the study’s lead author, Daniel D’Orazio, a graduate student at Columbia, in a statement. “Getting there is a holy grail of our field.”
Let’s all hope we live a little longer. Here’s what it might look like though.