RADIO astronomers say they may have caught a pair of supermassive black holes spiralling towards catastrophe. If they have, it is an amazing piece of luck. Theories on how galaxies form and merge predict that while many such pairs are created, they only last a few years to a few millennia before crashing together.
Greg Taylor’s team at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, studied an unidentified object called Compact Symmetrical Object 0402+379, which is about 760 million light years from Earth near the constellation of Perseus. Using the Very Long Baseline Array – 10 radio telescopes scattered from St Croix in the…
