Supermassive black holes: Two nearby giants are heading for a collision | New Scientist
A pair of relatively nearby supermassive black holes are getting ready to collide. These enormous objects are closer together than any supermassive pair we have spotted before, as well as being the closest pair to Earth.
Karina Voggel at the University of Strasbourg in France and her colleagues found these two behemoths using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The larger black hole has a mass 154 million times that of the sun, and the smaller one weighs in at 6.3 million solar masses.
They are in a galaxy called NGC 7727, which is about 89 million light years from Earth. The larger black hole sits at the centre of the galaxy, while the smaller one is about 1600 light years to the side it probably once belonged to a smaller galaxy that was swallowed up billions of years ago by NGC 7727.
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Now, the black holes themselves are heading towards a merger. The researchers calculate that they are likely to smash together and merge into a single colossal black hole in about 250 million years.