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This is an illustration from Caltech shows how two black holes are circling each other. Credit: Caltech-IPAC
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This is an illustration from Caltech shows how two black holes are circling each other. Credit: Caltech-IPAC<\/p>\n
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At a distance of some 9 billion light-years away, two massive black holes are dancing a cosmic waltz.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In a recent study published in <\/span>The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/span><\/a>, the black holes are called PKS-2131-021 and they are closely orbiting around each other \u2014 so close, says NASA, that they are almost 100 percent merged.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n They get closer and closer every two years, and will be completely merged together in about 10,000 years. This may seem like a long time but it usually takes about 100 million years for black holes this large to even start orbiting one another. NASA says these black holes are millions if not billions of times the mass of our Sun.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n PKS-2131-021 is one of 1,800 black holes that a team of researchers at Caltech have been monitoring for 13 years in the Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Big Pine, California.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA black hole is a very special thing. It is something that once existed only in mathematics as a consequence of Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity\u201d said Michele Vallisneri, who works at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and co-authored the recent study. \u201cIt seemed quite extreme impossible \u2014 like one of those predictions that you get out of mathematics [that] should not exist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In 2016 astronomers at Caltech were studying gravitational waves which are in invisible ripples in space produced whenever there is a drastic change in mass. While searching for these ripples, they detected two black holes near each other. However, the black holes exhibited strange behavior due to the irregular brightness, and to confirm that these black holes were circling each other they had to pull data from 2008 to 2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n