Washington, Nov 21: Two giant black holes have been found at the centre of a galaxy born from the joining of two smaller galaxies and are drifting toward a cataclysmic collision that will send ripples throughout the universe many millions of years from now, scientists have said. The detection of the supermassive black holes collapsing objects so dense that their gravity draws in all material around them, including light is the first definitive evidence that two of them can exist in the same galaxy.

These particular black holes, found by a team of researchers using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are circling each other in a Mephisto waltz that will lead to their merging in several hundred million years. That joining, astronomers said, will result in a monumental release of radiation and gravitational waves that should stretch across the universe.

"These gravitational waves will spread out to produce ripples in the fabric of space," one member of the research team, Dr Gunther Hasinger, said at a Nasa briefing for reporters. Eventually, those ripples will hit Earth's galaxy and cause infinitesimal wobbling in all matter, though it would be far too tiny to be noticed by humans.
Dr Hasinger, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics, near Munich, said previous observations of NGC 6240, the galaxy with the two black holes, had detected only two bright centre regions. But the Chandra observatory's ability to make high-resolution observations of X-ray emissions identified the sources of those radiation bursts as black holes, he said. Bureau Report