Collision of 3 Supermassive Black Holes

Post Reply New Topic

Three supermassive black holes are about to collide. The system where the black holes are located is known as SDSS J084905.51+111447.2. The collision should produce major fireworks as they fuse together. These black holes are true monsters.

This event should not pose a threat to our planet because this collision will occur about a billion light years from Earth. That is around 5,880,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.

Source: 3 monster black holes are going to collide

Because of relativity theory, this collision may have already occurred millions of year ago and we just haven't seen it yet. That is because we are looking back a billion years in time.

If you're looking at something four light years away (like the nearest star that's not our sun) you are seeing it as it looked four years ago because it took light four years to get to your eye from the object. That's totally without Einstein.

So if we are seeing three supermassive black holes in the same neighborhood as each other about to collide, and the neighborhood is a billion light years away then we are seeing them ( and their collision courses) as they were a billion years ago. We might be seeing them as they looked maybe a million years before they actually collided. So its safe to say that they have already collided, and that it happened maybe a billion-minus-one-million years ago. You don't even hafta invoke Relativity Theory.

A million years from now we may detect the gravity wave from the massive event.

And maybe some group of spacefaring aliens have "caught the wave" and are surfing our way as we speak!

Looking back a billion years in time...

... sounds like a weekend in Morecambe...

... sorry, Morecambe.

Albert Einstein, in his theory of special relativity, determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and he showed that the speed of light within a vacuum is the same no matter the speed at which an observer travels.

that feels as far above my pay grade, as i am above an amoeba. it is all so cosmic. i wonder how big a gravity wave it would cause?

It is true that understanding delay of what we see does not require understanding of general relativity.
Something has happened far away and the pigeons carrying the information (photons and gravity waves) didn't reach us yet.
What both special and general relativity claim is, there is fundamentally no faster way to carry information than our pigeons and it has consequences in the very structure of space and time - but it's irrelevant to simple "it might have already happened but the news couldn't reach us yet".

can gravity waves [rarefactions] travel faster than light?

No, in vacuum both travel at c.
You can slow down light in non-vacuum (I didn't study general relativity enough to know how about gravity waves) but it doesn't change relativistic equations and fundamental limits.

^^^thank you

I also feel I am an insignificant dabbler in these things... but it's fascinating anyway.

I suspect the gravity wave would be very big.

but depending on its Hz it could be felt unless it was less than a fraction of a cycle per second. if it was any greater than that it could cause catastrophe on earth.

Gravity waves from such a distant event wouldn't be noticeable to anything but specialistic detectors.
But their pattern would be more than interesting

In scientific terms, at a billion light-years distance, the effect of the triple collision on our gravity-wave detectors would be the equivalent of a gnat-fart in a wind-storm.

that is comforting to know.

If it happen within our own galaxy it might be curtains for us..

But yes. If it happened a 100 times closer to us (like only ten million LYs away)from where it happened it MIGHT be detectable by our most sensitive devices. But it wouldn't effect us in our daily lives. Its a big event, but countered by a HUGE distance (remember the inverse square law).

But maybe advanced aliens in UFOs hitch rides on naturally occurring gravity waves to aid travel to far corners of the universe, including to our own planet..