The Breakthrough
A discovery earlier this year by astronomers have revealed two massive black holes that have been circling towards each other
in a collision. This impact has been predicted then by those astronomers that it is going to be so powerful, it will be sending a burst of gravitational waves throughout the space-time's fabric itself. A recent study by the journal Nature states that Columbia University's astronomers have provided additional evidence that these two black holes, based on the calculations they have made on their masses, will collide with each other 100,00 years from now.
The Implications
"This is the closest we've come to observing two black holes on their way to a massive collision," says Zoltan Haiman, one of the astronomers at Columbia University and the study's senior author. "Watching this process reach its culmination can tell us whether black holes and galaxies grow at the same rate, and ultimately test a fundamental property of space-time: its ability to carry vibrations called gravitational waves, produced in the last, most violent, stage of the merger."
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