What could be more epic than two supermassive black holes colliding? We may not have to watch a movie to see such an event, because scientists have discovered a set of black holes that may smash into each other in our lifetime. Scientists recently published a report in The Astrophysical Journal Letters detailing a binary system of black holes at the edge of the observable universe, with a mass of over 10 billion stars. The report notes that the black holes are packed together so tightly that they will collide in about two decades (yes, just two decades).
Lead author from the University of Maryland Tingting Liu and her co-authors discovered the imminent collision by spotting a quasar that flickered at regular intervals. Quasars — black holes that swallow large amounts of gas, heating the gas up enough to create light — usually flicker at irregular intervals due to the placement and pull of gas being random. The quasar Liu found was flickering with regularity, brightening once per 542 days. Liu’s explanation is that the accretion disk, the swirling gas around the black hole, is asymmetrical for some reason, and that reason is probably another black hole that clips the accretion disk every 542 days, causing the flash of light Liu and her colleagues observed.
