A prediction has been made that 2 supermassive black holes in a galaxy 1.1 billion light years away will collide within the next 3 years. The galaxy has a core that is extremely bright in optical, ultraviolet and x-rays and the interesting thing is the intensity of the radiation fluctuates and the period of the fluctuations has been shortening, just three years ago the fluctuation was about one year long but today it's only about one month. There could be several reasons for this but the most obvious one is that 2 supermassive black holes, each with about 100,000,000 solar masses, had an orbital period of one year back in 2019 but an orbital period of only one month today; if that is indeed the case then they are orbiting faster and faster and thus getting closer and closer together and should collide sometime within the next 3 years, perhaps even this year. Such a collision would produce enormously powerful gravitational waves but LIGO will not be able to see them because the longest frequency wave it can detect is about a 10th of a second and colliding supermassive Black Holes would produce gravitational waves with a period of hours or days; however such waves might be detectable by observing simultaneous tiny changes in the frequency of pulsars located in widely separated places; this is because the gravitational waves would slightly move the Earth and thus slightly change the observed frequency of the pulsars in a way that was consistent with their location relative to us.
The great thing about this prediction is that we'll know if it's right or wrong within the next 3 years. Tick-Tock: The Imminent Merger of a Supermassive Black Hole Binary <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11633.pdf> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> bb9 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0zN6WVgr43DUsSJy3Jav9Lp2dezTRTQ9pCYun4NFDQCQ%40mail.gmail.com.
