Something astonishing appears to be taking place at the heart of a faraway galaxy 1.2 billion light-years away: the merging of two gigantic black holes with a combined mass of hundreds of millions of suns appears to be in the last stages. tremendous gravitational waves that will travel through space in the wake of this cataclysmic event that will hammer the space-time fabric of the Universe Furthermore, when scientists declare that an event is 'about to' occur, they are not implying that it will occur hundreds or millions of years in the future, but rather that it will occur within a period of one hundred to three hundred days in the future.

Almost immediately after the study's pre-publication version was made available on the arXiv pre-publication server a few days ago, other astronomers scrambled to prepare their telescopes so they wouldn't miss a show that might include gravitational waves as well as an explosion of light spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum. and cause enormous volumes of neutrinos to be emitted, which would disclose crucial information about the collision.

Nobody, in a nutshell, wants to be absent when the show takes place. Humans, according to Huan Yang, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, and a co-author of the study, "have reacted quite swiftly."

It's possible that you're seeing things.
But it's possible that nothing happened at all and that the forecast turned out to be a complete illusion. Consider the fact that it is not totally apparent that this galaxy contains two black holes, and that all of the data offered by researchers "is rather circumstantial," according to some experts.

Despite the fact that we know that nearly all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, astronomers differ on how they might grow to such enormous sizes (several have been found to have tens of billions of times the mass of the galaxy). Sun). Some of those 'beasts' are sporadically feeding on the surrounding material, heating it to the point where it begins to glow with incredible intensity as a result of the heat generated. However, it's possible that this isn't enough to explain its enormous size.

Those who believe that black holes can expand by merging with other black holes believe that this is something that occurs during the many collisions that occur between galaxies. Eventually, both black holes would merge into a single much larger one as a result of the gravitational attraction that would exist between them.

Those pairs of black holes, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to identify. Up to this point, huge X-ray telescopes have only been able to detect a small number of active galactic nuclei (AGN), each of which has two distinct central sources. ' Please keep it brief. In reality, and despite the fact that it is almost inevitable that they will eventually merge, the process could take billions of years. Any astronomer would find this to be excessively long.

A few active galactic nuclei, on the other hand, appear to dim and then brighten on a regular basis, and astronomers believe this is due to the presence of two black holes orbiting around each other before merging, periodically reheating material with each orbit. The cosmic environment that surrounds them causes them to go through cycles of brightness and fading. They are referred to as newspapers.

This is a really unique situation.
The authors of the study, working under the guidance of Ning Jiang of the University of Science and Technology of China, discovered one such periodic AGN, designated SDSSJ1430+2303, while conducting their research. 'And my immediate thought was that it had to be tied to a pair of supermassive black holes,' Jiang explains.

However, the researchers noticed something else, something that led them to believe that a pair of black holes was on the verge of merging: the cycles of lighting and dimming were becoming increasingly brief. Because of this, they have shrunk from lasting a year to just lasting a month in just three years of observation. In other words, their orbits around each other were getting closer and closer, signaling the beginning of a very close encounter in space and time. According to Jiang, if this downward trend continues, the two black holes, which are presently as near together as the Sun is to Pluto, will combine during the next 100 to 300 days, according to Jiang.

a bright flash of light
It is predicted that if this team is correct and the merger occurs, there will be "a tremendous bang over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio," according to the team. It is also possible that a real neutrino avalanche may occur, which would be easily detected by the Ice Cube, the neutrino detector erected at the South Pole. Despite the fact that none of this is certain.

The only thing that is definite is that if nuclear fusion occurs, it will generate powerful gravitational waves, although there is an issue with gravitational waves in general. When two massive items collide, they will effectively create electromagnetic waves at a frequency that is too low to be detected by current detectors, which are tuned to the waves generated by the collision of much smaller objects (and with higher frequencies). higher). According to the researchers, it would be feasible to detect the trace they leave in space-time itself, a kind of relaxation of distance and time known as 'gravitational wave memory,' and that it may be evident for many years by monitoring the activity of pulsars, even if they were not detected. Yes, it's complicated, but it's doable. It would also provide as convincing proof of the merger of two supermassive black holes if it were to be accomplished.

For the time being, the only thing that can be done is to continue to monitor the situation and see if the cycle durations continue to shrink over the next few weeks, which would indicate that the black holes are growing closer to each other. If everything plays out as predicted by the study, it will be the first time that this form of merging has been recorded between two objects of such immense size. And possibly, for the first time, an answer will be discovered to the subject of the excessive growth of these dark space giants in the near future.