Two Black Holes to Merge

An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes that they predict will eventually collide. As they say in bad SF, 'it could warp the fabric of space.'"

Comments

Heh

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

I remember reading a book, I think it was part of the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter, where the premise of the story was that every few hundred million years a collision like this killed all life in the entire galaxy through a massive release of radiation.

Tim

When anf How Far

[kmellis]

Note that although the distance to this galaxy and when the collision will be observed both just happen to be in the half-billion year range, the two numbers are independent.

(Except that there's the weird possibility that the speed of gravity waves may not be equal to the speed of light. Gravity waves are what the article is presumably referring to when it talks about "warping the fabric of space". BTW, I don't even pretend to understand the "speed of gravity" debate, nor even am I equipped to assess whether it's a legitimate debate or fringe/crank science. I can't even sort out the terms that are used.)

Can they be nullified?

[SAN1701]

I wonder what happens when a black-hole starts eating anti-matter (if it finds some). Does this decreases its mass, since matter and anti-matter destroy each other?

When is it going to happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, it said that it will happen in a couple hundred million years. However, since the black holes are 400 million light-years away, and the scientists are therefore looking at 400 million year old data...doesn't that mean it will happen soon?