The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently shared images of two supermassive black holes merging and it has received plenty of comments on social media. The official Instagram account of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shared a pair of images which showed two supermassive black holes in the process of merging. According to the post, the black holes, located in Galaxy NGC 6240 are 3,000 light-years apart and they will drift together to form a larger black hole millions of years from now. As per a blog post by the observatory, the merging process began some 30 million years ago The blog post also states that pairs of massive black holes in the process of merging are expected to be the most powerful sources of gravitational waves in the Universe. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a telescope specially designed to detect X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe such as exploded stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes. Orbiting at 139,000 km in space, the telescope was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-93 by NASA in 1999. Take a look at some of the reactions here: For the uninitiated, supermassive black holes are the largest types of black holes, which are millions of times as massive as the Sun.
