Although the ozone layer and atmosphere of Earth shield us from the worst of it, stars like our sun are furious beings that continually spew out radiation, gamma rays, and other awful stuff.
But when stars die, especially massive ones, their anger becomes much more ruthless. If a star is large enough towards the conclusion of its life cycle, it will collapse in on itself to become a black hole.
Gravitational Attraction
The gravitational attraction of these singularities is what distinguishes them; it is so intense that not even light can escape. In other words, whatever transpires within a black hole remains there.
But the size and number of black holes aren’t really constrained. A typical black hole is three to 10 times larger than our sun on average.
As huge as “ordinary” black holes may get, supermassive black holes can grow to be millions or billions of times larger than our closest star. They are thought to emerge over billions of years as black holes combine.
And there may be billions of supermassive black holes throughout the cosmos. In reality, there is one at the Milky Way’s center named Sagittarius A*, around which the entire galaxy revolves.
Each of the two supermassive black holes that are nearest to Earth is approximately 200 million and 125 million times as massive as the sun.
Supermassive Black Holes
Supermassive black holes certainly live up to their name, but if two of them were to collide and mutually engulf one another, it would produce one of the universe’s largest explosions, with gravitational waves reverberating across the whole cosmos.
Recently, scientists reported finding the closest-ever pair of supermassive black holes that are currently known to be on a collision trajectory.
The finding also raises the possibility that merging black holes are more frequent than previously thought.
Other Reports, Gravitational Waves
The mass of eight suns vanished on May 21, 2019. Since mass cannot vanish in a world like ours where energy and mass are preserved without repercussions, the cosmos vibrated when two far-off black holes combined.
After the merger, a strong gravitational shockwave spread out for billions of years before passing past Earth. Every cell in your body that day, along with every other atom on Earth and in the solar system, stretched and contracted in four fast successions.
One of the wonders of contemporary science is that they can measure such far-off occurrences in the cosmos with some degree of accuracy.
About 16 billion light-years away from everyone, or 17% of the width of the known universe, this specific merger took place. Such extraordinarily far-off celestial occurrences were largely a mystery to scientists until recently.
The view of the cosmos has just recently become more expansive with the development of gravitational wave astronomy, a brand-new discipline within observational astronomy.
