It’s difficult to imagine something more scary and destructive than a supermassive black hole, most people would say. But how about two such cosmic monsters dancing around one another until their impending demise through collision? That’s exactly what astronomers discovered through PKS 2131-021, according to UniverseToday.com.
PKS 2131-021 is the name of the pair of supermassive black holes that orbit each other at a distance of 200 to 2,000 AU apart from one another. The black holes complete an orbit around one another in about two years. The pair is also very far away from Earth, meaning that there’s absolutely no need to worry that we might be in trouble.
PKS 2131-021 is 8.8 billion light-years away
Considering that the pair of supermassive black holes is located so far away from Earth, there’s not even one hundred percent guarantee that those dark cosmic monsters are still there in the present. It surely means that they were there 8.8 billion years ago. What happens is that even light itself needs time to travel huge distances. We see a cosmic object the way it was when the light left it, not necessarily how it is in the present. It even applies to the Sun, as the light emitted by it needs about 8 minutes to travel to us.
The two black holes from the pair are expected to collide with one another in roughly 10,000 years. Although it sounds like an eternity for us, it’s practically nothing at an astronomical scale. The collision will inevitably generate powerful gravitational waves across the Universe.
Supermassive black holes even have a beneficial role in nature. Astronomers believe that there should be one such black hole at the heart of every galaxy out there. One supermassive black hole exists for sure at the heart of the Milky Way, and the formation of the galaxy itself wouldn’t have been possible without it.