A collision between a comet or asteroid and a planet is interesting enough. It can leave behind a huge crater and a vast blanket of dust that shall block the sunlight for hundreds or thousands of years. As a result, most life forms on the planet would slowly but surely die. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs long ago, and hopefully, it won’t happen to us as well someday.
But how about a collision between two supermassive black holes? That would indeed be the “real deal.” The SDSS J1430+2303 galaxy is located over 1 billion light-years away from us. According to astronomers’ observations that ScienceAlert tells us about, the galaxy is supposed to contain a pair of supermassive black holes in its core that will collide with one another very soon. Since we all know that “very soon” can mean a lot for us humans when we speak about astronomy, that’s not the case here. The two black holes are expected to collide in only three years. That’s three times our Earth completes a full rotation around the Sun!
Supermassive black holes represent just one out of a total of four types of these cosmic monsters can belong to. The others are stellar, intermediate, and miniature.
Even nowadays, scientists hope to uncover a lot more information about black holes, and they’ll probably learn more than ever thanks to the explorations of NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, which also aims to study these cosmic conundrums.
In the end, there’s no absolute guarantee that the J1430+2303 galaxy is indeed hosting two galaxies that will collide with one another. It may be something totally different that’s going on in the galaxy’s core, and astronomers hope to uncover the mystery soon enough. Thank God the galaxy is very far away from us!
The new study paper is available on arXiv.