Astronomers have detected two black holes at the same time just 750 light-years away, and they will eventually merge into one supermassive black hole, according to RT.
They were discovered by researchers using the ALMA telescope, the most powerful molecular dust and gas telescope, located in the Atacama Desert.
While the team was studying two merged galaxies in the constellation of Cancer, 500 million light-years from Earth, they saw something they didn’t expect.
They saw two glowing black holes greedily gobbling up the dust, gas and other material that the merger had displaced.
And although black holes are cosmically close, they will not merge for several hundred million years.
Eventually, as the orbit tightens and gas and stars cross between them, they will begin to orbit each other. Ultimately, before black holes collide, the researchers said, they will start generating gravitational waves far more powerful than anything previously detected.
The findings also suggest that binary black holes and the merging galaxies they create may actually be surprisingly common in the universe.
Experts said the use of ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, is a “game-changer” and that finding two black holes so close to each other could pave the way for further studies on the phenomenon.
The findings of the new research have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington.
