JavaScript is not activated in your browser. Please activate JavaScript to use the whole functionality of this website! Two massive touching stars in a neighbouring galaxy are on course to become black holes that will eventually crash together, generating waves in the fabric of space-time, according to a new study by researchers at University College London and the University of Potsdam.
They orbit each other every three days and are the most massive touching stars known as contact binaries yet observed. The surviving star will become a black hole shortly after.
These black holes will form in only a couple of million years, but will then orbit each other for billions of years before colliding with such force that they will generate gravitational waves β ripples in the fabric of space-time.
But so far we have yet to observe, stars that are predicted to collapse into black holes of this size and merge in a time scale shorter than or even broadly comparable to the age of the universe.
Our best-fit model suggests these stars will merge as black holes in 18 billion years. Finding stars on this evolutionary pathway so close to our Milky Way galaxy presents us with an excellent opportunity to learn even more about how these black hole binaries form.
