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Asked by Yash The [A] Star to Pierre, Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa on 13 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by ur gna get shreked m9.
Question: What would happen if 2 black holes collided together?
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Pierre Lasorak answered on 13 Nov 2014:
Hi
So that’s a good question, because we more or less know what happen if to start spins around each other, but we haven’t had the chance to see this. First it would be very difficult to see this process because black holes are… black, so we can observe them with a telescope.
We could detect such a process though (and that would be Nobel prize assured if somebody did) in a gravitational wave detector like LIGO (you can check on internet). Basically when 2 massive objects are spinning around each other, they produce some wave around them, and eventually they loose energy and collide. The wave is a deformation of space that propagate. I don’t really want to go lot further because this in very complicated (you have to understand Einstein’s theory quite well to come to this). Anyway if you measure very precisely 2 distances, and a gravitational wave come in the middle, then the distance will change, and you can measure it (hopefully).
Once the 2 black holes have lost enough spinning energy then they would come together and you wont be able to distinguish them.
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Kate Dobson answered on 18 Nov 2014:
As Pierre says, this is really advanced stuff. I did physics at university and I don’t come close to understanding this!
Comments
Yash The [A] Star commented on :
Thanks, and did you mean ”…black, so we observe them using a telescope” because black holes aren’t visible to the eye as it sucks in light faster than light can reach us…
Pierre commented on :
Hi
No very good point. I meant we cannot see them! Basically if you look at the centre of our galaxy you see a big black region! Yes this happen because whatever come close enough to the black hole (including light) never escape from it.