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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.'"
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EVERYTHING WITH MASS WARPS SPACE. The more massive it is, the more it warps space. Black holes warp space so much it "tears," for lack of a better term. Two black holes combining into one huge black hole isn't going to do anything that they wouldn't do otherwise.
They might *think* they're doing the right thing, but they're young now. Let's just hope they sign a pre-nup.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steven Wright
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
no one else is reporting that AOL-TW and Microsoft are going to merge.
Two black holes combining into one huge black hole isn't going to do anything that they wouldn't do otherwise. ...Except releasing gravity waves of strong enough magnitude to be detected from great distances.
Magnitude matters.
Two giant black holes have been found at the center of a galaxy born from the joining of two smaller galaxies and are drifting toward a cataclysmic collision that will send ripples throughout the universe many millions of years from now, scientists said today.
or, we will have destroyed ourselves or a meteor will destroy us by the time we see this.
Eventually, those ripples will hit Earth's galaxy and cause infinitesimal wobbling in all matter, though it would be far too tiny to be noticed by humans.
Even if we do survive long enough to see it, we won't care
"This is the first time we have ever identified a binary black hole. This is the aftermath of two galaxies that collided sometime in the past."
So it is not enough that we might be sucked into one black hole, now we can be split apart by two.
In about four billion years, astronomers believe, the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy will collide and merge, fusing their black holes into one.
So in addition to meteors, magnetic reversal, volcanos, and sunspot we know have to worry about another galaxies offing us.
The Sun is expected to blow up into a nova in three billion years, and perhaps then collapse to form a small black hole of its own, he said.
But this doesn't matter because our sun will suck in our burned remnants long before that.
Now, why is it that we are so optimistic?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The earth's sun will burn it self out long before the few hundred million years, so the question is do two black holes really collide if no one is there to watch them????