Discovery

Studies said, it is only a matter of time before our galaxy collide, because in every single hour we pass, the Milky Way gets half a million kilometers closer to Andromeda, another large spiral galaxy.

Lying at the center of our galaxy is a giant black hole, with a mass of an order of magnitude between 105 and 1010 (hundreds of thousands and tens of billions) of solar masses. What will happen to these black holes during the encounter? Let’s see.

Astronomers have started to find clues, recently. Most of them said that these hungry behemoths simply sat at the heart of their parent galaxies, vacuuming up gas clouds and ripped-apart stars. A black hole can cut loose when two galaxies collide.

Manuela Campanelli, from University of Texas at Brownsville and the Rochester Institute of Technology said, for 30 years, people had been struggling to solve that problem. But, suddenly, there has been a spectacular breakthrough. What had stymied for so long was the horrendous complexity of applying Einstein’s general theory of relativity to pairs black holes.

Enter F. Pretorius, a physicist at Princetown University surprised everyone by finding an answer. His remedy exploits the fact that Einstein’s equations hold good no matter how you describe your location in space-time. This meant that, if we just used a different way of specifying the position of two black holes. The mathematics might become simple enough to allow theorist to calculate what happens when the black holes collide. This breakthrough was to find the right sort of coordinates.

A month later, Campanelli’s group had adapted their quite different method. It was presented at a conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland.

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