This Trippy Simulation Shows How Monster Black Holes Glow Before They Collide
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor | October 4, 2018 11:38am ET
A new model suggests that merging supermassive black holes will glow in eerie ultraviolet and X-ray light as they spiral into an inevitable crash.
Supermassive black holes are millions or billions of times the mass of the sun and reside in just about every galaxy that is at least the size of our own Milky Way, according to a NASA statement. Scientists know that galaxies commonly combine; this will happen with the Milky Way and Andromeda, for example, in about 4 billion years.
"We know galaxies with central supermassive black holes combine all the time in the universe, yet we only see a small fraction of galaxies with two [black holes] near their centers," Scott Noble, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. [No Escape: Dive Into a Black Hole (Infographic)]
While scientists have seen black hole mergers before, these were much smaller, according to the statement — comparable to the size of a star, meaning anywhere from three to a few dozen times the mass of the sun. These stellar-size black hole mergers were detected using the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Scientists found them by detecting gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time generated after these large mergers.
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