It is not the first time scientists are viewing galaxies combining, I mean there are billions of galaxies in our ever expanding universe, but they haven’t seen the end stage of colliding galaxies. The end stage results to the black holes in the center of each universe smash into each other, releasing some pretty violent cosmic fireworks that could wrap space time itself.

The theory which was published in journal nature by researchers including scientists from Caltech and NASA’s jet propulsion Lab, suggests that an unusual light signal they are seeing from PG 1302-102, essentially a black hole emitting light from the super-heated particles swirling around its gravitational drain — is being caused by cosmic dance between black holes in the system, each located less than the length of our solar system apart.

When you look at the emission lines in a spectrum from an object, what you are really seeing is the information about the speed, whether something is moving toward you or away and how fast. It’s the Doppler Effect.

If the theory is correct, study co-author George Djorgovski of California institute told the New York Times that when two black holes collide, they would release the energy equivalent to 100 million supernova explosion, which would rip apart the galaxy in which they are floating. The collision would also release gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space time predicted be Einstein theory of general relativity.

It is so unfortunate for astronomers who are hoping to witness such an event are out of luck, as predicted union won’t take place for about another million years, which is super long for human standards. The universe already knows whether the theory is correct because the light we are seeing from this system, located in the Virgo constellation, comes from 3.5 billion light years away, meaning what we are seeing right know took place billions of years ago.

Until someday we will learn to travel through time, not going to our past or future, I mean travelling through space time, wrapping space time continuum. We will continue to wait and see what happened after the black holes collides and whether the theory was right or wrong.

Source: SmartPlanet