Black Holes Collide
"In a looming collision of giants, two super
massive black holes are drifting towards a violent merger and an eruption of
energy that will warp the fabric of space"
Sound like science fiction?
It isn't. The words above were written in an article entitled "Telescope Sees Black Holes Merging", by Paul Recer, writer for the online Yahoo Science AP. The article was posted November 19. 2002.
The Harvard-sponsored Chandra Observatory has captured for the first time two black holes in orbit around each other in the extraordinarily bright galaxy NGC6240, a mere 400 million light years away. This is no stable orbit. The two black holes, says Stefanie Komossa, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, are "the aftermath of two galaxies that collided.." to form the new galaxy that we now know. Galaxies colliding, deformed space-time--heady stuff, but far in the future. The black holes aren't expected to collide for another 100 million years. (Although, keep in mind, this info and the pictures are already 400 million years old)
Yet if you live that long…and hey, you never know… earth is going
to RIPPLE… squeezed by an inch or so every few minutes, depending on how
close it is to the black hole. In the context of nuclear bombs…it is so
far beyond our imagination…it'll be the best show in town for centuries!
Actually, we would be unlikely to feel much…although I imagine that we
would feel a bit queasy and/or radiation could be a difficulty.
These two black holes each have a mass equivalent to about 100 million suns. Each of the galaxies around the black holes, before they collided, were about the same size as the Milky Way.
The last scary thought…in 4 billion years, scientists expect that the Milky
Way--our galaxy--is going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy and our respective
black holes are going to do the same thing!
What, you didn't know that we have a black hole at the center of our galaxy? All signs point to the idea that we do. And when our galaxy collides, humanity better be extinct or very advanced, or we'll be extinct anyways..radiation output, even over parsec distances can still fry our bacon.
