Roiling inside the belly of a quasar, two supermassive black holes are in fact whirling towards one another on their way to a union that will blast shock waves through space and time, a Columbia University study concluded.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, corroborate conclusions other astronomers reached near the start of this year. The two infinite points of density are spinning round and round inside of quasar PG 1302-102 and the two black holes are set to merge, in about 100,000 years, much sooner than previously predicted.
Studying the two black holes, one significantly larger than the other, could give scientists a better idea of how our own Milky Galaxy could meet its end. The Monster of the Milky Way, the supermassive black hole in our back yard, is on a collision course with its bigger brother lurking in the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy.
PG 1302-102 has been strobing rhythmically, which evidence the tango between the black holes inside of it. Quasars typically flicker at random, but PG 1302-102 is bumping to the beat of two black holes swirling around at about a tenth of the speed of light.
Intrigued by the findings of Cal Tech's Matthew Graham and his team, the Columbia University researchers created a new model that brought them, and us, more details about the strobe lights and dizzying dances of the black holes inside of PG 1302-102, according to study's senior author, Zoltan Haiman, an astronomer at Columbia.
"Watching this process reach its culmination can tell us whether black holes and galaxies grow at the same rate, and ultimately test a fundamental property of space-time: its ability to carry vibrations called gravitational waves, produced in the last, most violent, stage of the merger," said Haiman.
When those two black holes finally consummate their union, about 3.5 billion light years away from us, the merger is expected to generate gravitational waves of a magnitude that has only been predicted by Albert Einstein and never detected.
Watching the interaction between these two black holes, separated by roughly the distance between the sun and Oort Cloud, will help scientist improve their searches for other black holes and that could enable them to test Einstein's theory in our universe's "most extreme environment," as stated by lead study author, Daniel D'Orazio, a graduate student at Columbia.
"Getting there is a holy grail of our field," D'Orazio said.
