Two Supermassive Black Holes About To Embrace

Taco Cowboy writes "NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) satellite was looking at a distant galaxy, some 3.8 billion light-years away, and saw something rather unusual. At first they thought that they saw a galaxy was forming new stars at a furious rate, but upon closer checking, they found that they were seeing two supermassive black holes spiraling closer and closer to each other. The dance of this black hole duo started out slowly, with the objects circling each other at a distance of about a few thousand light-years. As the black holes continued to spiral in toward each other, they were separated by just a few light-years. Supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies typically shoot out pencil-straight jets, but in this case, the jet showed a zig-zag pattern. According to the scientists, a second massive black hole could, in essence, be pushing its weight around to change the shape of the other black hole's jet. Visible-light spectral data from the Gemini South telescope in Chile showed similar signs of abnormalities, thought to be the result of one black hole causing disk material surrounding the other black hole to clump. Together, these and other signs point to what is probably a fairly close-knit set of circling black holes, though the scientists can't say for sure how much distance separates them."

Re:If they where thousands of light years apart...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're looking at the wavy motion in the jet they put out - which is apparently showing a history of their interaction.

Re:FSVO "about"

[CapOblivious2010]

You're close - but the whole point of relativity is that there is no "absolute time". With one caveat (see below) It's ALL relative to the observer. There are some observers (specifically those roughly motionless with respect to the earth and the two black holes, like us) for whom "then" and "now" are separated by 3.8b years. There are (or could be) other observers (specifically those traveling at something close to the speed of light in along a line between the black holes and us) for whom the two events are separated by far less time. For someone traveling along that line at the speed of light, the two events would be simultaneous.

The only hard and fast rule is that space-time is divided into 3 zones:
* The absolute past - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone leading up to here-and-now
* The absolute future - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone starting at here-and-now
* Everything else - events in neither light cone, which means they cannot affect us and we cannot affect them. Depending on an observer's motion relative to us and such an event, someone might see the event as happening at the same time as the here-and-now, or before, or after. It doesn't matter, because such an event is not causally connected to the here-and-now in either direction.

The interesting thing is that the vast majority of the universe is in the "everything else" zone.... contemplate that one for a while...