The odd activity of a galaxy billions of light-years away suggests that it may be home to one of space exploration’s most anticipated events.
Variations in light from the galaxy’s nucleus, SDSS J1430+2303, resemble a pair of colliding supermassive black holes with a total mass of about 200 million Suns.
This wait can often last a lifetime in cosmological terms. However, if the signal is created by gigantic black holes, physicists estimate they will merge within the next three years.
It could be our best chance yet to see two supermassive black holes collide. However, it is unknown whether this is the actual activity occurring at the heart of J1429+2303. Scientists advise keeping an eye on the strange galaxy to see if it can be definitively identified.
The discovery of colliding black holes in 2015 signaled the start of a daring new era in science. Many more observations have been made since then, thanks to the gravitational waves sent vibrating across space-time by these massive events.
So far, the majority of these interactions have included binary pairs of black holes with masses comparable to individual stars. This is for a very good reason. LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors are designed for this mass range.
The heavier vibrations produced by inspiralling and merging supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the Sun, are too weak to be detected by our current detectors.
Seeing the merger of two supermassive black holes would be amazing. Scientists anticipate a large explosion of light across the spectrum even in the absence of a detector capable of detecting low-frequency gravitational waves.
The information contained within that scream may explain a great deal about how these events develop. We don’t know exactly how supermassive black holes grow so large, but there are a few signs that binary mergers could be one way.
