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Three supermassive black holes billions of light-years away

Super black holes are going to collide, and it's going to be spectacular

By Zhiwei LuPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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Stars, unlike their name, they don't last forever, and one day stars will come to an end. When the star's hydrogen fuel gradually runs out, the power of nuclear fusion can no longer fight against the strong gravitational forces, which declares the star's death.

Stars of different masses die in very different ways, with small and medium-sized stars, like our sun, dying into white dwarfs. When they die, massive stars can collapse into neutron stars or even black holes.

Black holes, as the name suggests, are completely black, because even the light is completely swallowed by the strong gravity of the black hole. Black holes themselves do not emit light or reflect light, so they are called "black holes".

But just because a black hole is "completely black" doesn't mean it can't be seen. Scientists can find black holes by their interactions with objects around them and determine their parameters, such as mass and volume.

We now know black holes exist, and in 2019 scientists photographed them for the first time. But a few decades ago, because black holes themselves were so weird, they must have been written off as nonexistent, and many people even made fun of the idea.

There are two kinds of black holes, stellar black holes, which are created when a star dies. The other is a supermassive black hole, usually at the center of a galaxy, that can reach a mass of several million to several billion times the mass of the sun.

Since black holes can swallow anything that comes close, one black hole is already scary. Here's what two black holes can do.

Black holes usually exist alone, but there is no rule out two black holes appearing in pairs, spinning together around a common center of mass. Such pairs of black holes are not harmonious, being pulled by the strong gravity of each other as they spin, eventually colliding and merging into larger black holes.

The spectacle of two black holes merging and colliding is spectacular, causing a huge jolt to the surrounding space-time, causing chaos in the fabric of space-time, creating powerful ripples in space-time and releasing enormous amounts of energy, making it the most violent cosmic event since the Big Bang.

The resulting ripples in space-time are known as gravitational waves, and these waves travel across the vastness of space-time, much like the ripples in water we see when we throw a rock into a pond.

Because the black hole is so far away from Earth, the ripples in space-time from the collision will be so faint by the time they reach Earth that it's hard to feel them directly.

But scientists can detect the presence of gravitational waves with highly sensitive detectors that can detect very subtle ripples in space-time.

For example, in 2007, scientists detected three black holes moving together in the constellation Virgo, 10 billion light years away. The eventual merger of three black holes will be even more spectacular, violent, and chaotic than the merger of two black holes. Anything within 100 light years would be incinerated by the super energy of the collision!

In 1916, German astronomer Karl schwarzschild is obtained by computing a vacuum solution of the Einstein field equations, the solution shows that if a static spherically symmetric star actual radius is less than a fixed value, the surrounding will produce strange phenomena, is an interface - the "event horizon", once in the interface, even light can escape. This fixed value is called the Schwarzschild radius, and this "magical object" was named a "black hole" by the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.

Black holes cannot be observed directly, but they can be known indirectly about their existence and mass, and their effects on other things can be observed. The presence of a black hole can be detected by the "edge message" of X-rays and gamma rays emitted by the friction caused by the acceleration of the black hole's gravity before the object is sucked in. The EXISTENCE OF A BLACK HOLE CAN ALSO BE INFERRED BY INDIRECTLY OBSERVING THE ORBIT OF a STAR OR INTERSTELLAR CLOUD, AS WELL AS ITS POSITION AND MASS.

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