A prediction of an imminent Black Hole collision

[John Clark]

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

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

bb9

[Lawrence Crowell]

It would be best if continual measurements of pulsar timing was made. A large wavelength gravitational wave, maybe millions of kilometers long, would result in a time dilation of measured pulsar timing as the gravitational wave passes the space between us and the pulsar.

LC

[Brent Meeker]

It should be great chance to see if there are any second and higher order distortion in black hole collisions.  We don't have exact solutions describing black hole mergers, so we know they quickly settle down to simple ellipsoids (the no-hair theorem) but I would be good to know our approximate solutions haven't thrown away some short wave ripples.

Brent

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[Lawrence Crowell]

We are more likely to get better short wave gravitational wave modes from stellar mass black holes.

LC