The universe is filled with strange and intriguing phenomena. There is just too much that we don't understand yet and that is kind of exciting and frustrating at the same time.
One of the biggest mysteries that humanity has been pursuing for decades is that of black holes and how they function. Though we have come to know a lot about them, a lot remains to be answered.
For starters, we know that they are insanely dense objects with a very strong gravitational pull that suck up everything that crosses their event horizon and can even distort spacetime. We also recently took actual images of a real black hole.
As for unanswered questions, we don't have a clue about what goes on at the centre of one or if they have a 'white hole' counterpart or whether or not supermassive black holes actually merge.
According to a research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, two suppermassive black holes are on a collision course some 2.5 billion light years away from us. Supermassive black holes are the largest types of black holes and are usually found at the centre of galaxies.
A single supermassive black hole can have a mass hundreds of thousands to billions of times that of the mass of the Sun. So, one can imagine how powerful of an event their collision would be.
Scientists predict that the gravitational waves given off by such a collision could be a million times stronger than what was observed at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in 2016.
Such a massive cosmic event will provide useful insights to scientists even though the result of the collision will take billions of years to reach us. But there are also other collisions of supermassive black holes whose result will get to us in only the next few years.
Right now, we do not know whether two supermassive black holes merge together or they end up spiralling each other in an endless cycle. So, data from such a collision will answer a lot of questions.
