Black holes are believed to be the most mysterious and powerful objects in the universe, formed from the remnants of collapsed stars. Scientists believe most galaxies host a supermassive black hole at their center and when galaxies merge, two different black holes collide, releasing incomprehensible energy.
Scientists recently announced that for the very first time they'll observe a collision between three supermassive black holes in deep space—and they aren't quite sure what will happen.
This rare black hole triumvirate was found with the help of nearly half a dozen teams and tools, including the citizen-science project Galaxy Zoo, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), NASA’S Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), and NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), whose handlers have joined forces to discover an extraordinary system of three galaxies merging a billion light-years from our planet.
This discovery required studying infrared, X-ray, as well as gravitation data and was buoyed by the watershed detection of gravitational waves by physicists who used the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2016. According to The Mind Unleashed, Einstein had famously predicted the existence of gravitational waves precisely 100 years earlier in his general theory of relativity.
In his prediction, Einstein imagined colliding black holes would be spinning at a significant fraction of the speed of light. After spiraling towards each other, they either merge or, because of powerful gravitational waves, one gets “slingshot” away from the other into intergalactic space at speeds approaching 1.1 million km/h (685,000 mph).
The black hole which remains absorbs an incomprehensible amount of new energy, that swells in its accretion disk and then becomes an inflamed wraith of gas and dust which radiates for thousands of years.
So what can happen when three supermassive black holes merge? Well, scientists are quite curious about that themselves. According to the prevailing theory, the gravitational influence of the third black hole will bolster and expedite the merger of the two other black holes, solving a theoretical problem also known as the “final parsec problem.”
The video below depicts a simulation of this epic triumvirate of black holes colliding:
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