Black Holes Set to Collide

Luke 21:25,26 NLT “And there will be strange signs in the sun, moon, and stars. And here on earth the nations will be in turmoil, perplexed by the roaring seas and strange tides. People will be terrified at what they see coming upon the earth, for the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”

Two black holes in Virgo are heading for a “massive collision,” Columbia University astronomer Zoltan Haiman said in a Columbia news release posted on Science Daily. Haiman and his colleagues believe the pair of black holes will collide in about 100,000 years, which is virtually tomorrow in cosmic time. The holes are incredibly large: combined, the size of a billion suns,

The pair of black holes orbiting each other in quasar PG 1302-102, about 3.5 billion light-years away are about a light-week or two apart — less than 200 billion miles. Understanding that a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, what astronomers are seeing in PG 1302-102 actually occurred when life had just emerged on Earth.

Black hole mergers are considered to be the most violent events in the universe. When they finally meet, they converge in a type of “death spiral.” Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.

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