Two giants in the sky will collide with a bang...
When you look up into that big vasty nothingness that is outer space, it's easy enough to forget sometimes that it isn't really all that empty - there's a lot going on that we can't even see with our highest-powered telescopes right now!
Something we can see and detect right now is the presence of two black holes - but they aren't your usual variety of black holes. These are Supermassive, which means that they're much bigger than the standard fare.
Normal black holes are created when a star much larger than our Sun reaches the very end of its life, and collapses into itself, compressing the matter into a supremely dense region of space and forming a black hole.
Supermassive black holes might not have come from a star however, and could possibly even be a Primordial Black Hole - formed in the intense pressures early on in the Universe's life shortly after the Big Bang.
Whatever the cause for them, Supermassive black holes exist mainly in the centre of galaxies, as astrophysicists think their pull is enough to hold the galaxy together (and some even think there is a direct link between the size and pull of a Supermassive hole and the size of a galaxy). In one case though, there are two of them - directly next to each other.
Two Supers have been spotted in the sky, both emitting a different wavelength of visible light: one blue, and one red. The red is slightly larger than the other, but both circle each other at a period of 500 years and occupy a space underneath one light year (a light year is ten trillion kilometres, or 9.4605284 × 1015 metres - not a very large distance in space).
These two are in a fine balance between attraction and repulsion right now, and are effectively circling the drain until something upsets the balance enough to cause them to clash together - with a spectacular result. Of course this isn't really something to worry about from our perspective, and why?
Well, it's not really likely to happen for a billion years.
Still, by the time it does happen (assuming the human race is still around, and we haven't nuked ourselves into oblivion) we'll be able to observe the interaction from a safe enough distance - and we should survive it too.
Arstechnica has some more on these Super-holes, but you can sleep well tonight knowing that it's more likely your mailman will decide he has something against you and take you off the precipice of life, than these holes doing it for you.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012