• The Bard in Green
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    6 hours ago

    We know that black hole mergers are a thing, as LIGO has detected gravity waves from these exact events.

    To get too much more specific, we need to ponder the mass of the black holes and their distance of separation.

    You did specify that these black holes were of equal size. They would orbit each other, potentially for billions of years, just like any two other massive objects and how these orbits behaved would depend on their mass, orbital distance, relative velocity and the gravitational influence of any other large bodies. For example, two 30 solar mass black holes orbiting close to Sagittarius A* (our galaxy’s central super massive black hole) would have a very different orbital pattern from the same two black holes orbiting each other in intergalactic space.

  • @FourPacketsOfPeanuts
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    96 hours ago

    Yes! And this happening is exactly what allowed gravity waves to first be detected

  • april
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    106 hours ago

    Black holes merge. It doesn’t matter what size they are. It’s not that the bigger one eats the smaller one they just merge.

    • Don_DickleOP
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      25 hours ago

      Are we advanced enough to have seen this yet? Not calling you a liar just sounds interesting to watch…

      • @[email protected]
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        44 hours ago

        pretty sure that we can’t “watch” a black hole at all, since we need light to see and light cannot escape a black hole

        • Don_DickleOP
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          23 hours ago

          Ok dumb question if we can’t see or watch a black hole how do we know what they do or even exist?

          • @[email protected]
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            83 hours ago

            you should really read the Wikipedia article on black holes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

            some paragraphs you might find relevant to your question:

            By nature, black holes do not themselves emit any electromagnetic radiation other than the hypothetical Hawking radiation, so astrophysicists searching for black holes must generally rely on indirect observations. For example, a black hole’s existence can sometimes be inferred by observing its gravitational influence on its surroundings.

            David Finkelstein, in 1958, first published the interpretation of “black hole” as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality. The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971.

            The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Any matter that falls toward a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe. Stars passing too close to a supermassive black hole can be shredded into streamers that shine very brightly before being “swallowed.”[11] If other stars are orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole’s mass and location. Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems and established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses.