Chile’s telescopes, located in the best locations to explore space from Earth, have in their hands two galaxies that stand out for being the ones with the black holes closer to each other.
This pair of holes were already detected for the first time in 2021, with the tools of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), of the European Southern Observatory located in Chile, in the Atacama Desert. And now, pointing towards the same region, the Gemini South of Cerro Pachón captures the collision between these two galaxies, which are located 90 million light years from the Milky Way.
Swathes of interstellar dust and gas, and a huge amount of cosmic elements come together to form a huge ball that makes it look like galactic “cotton candy,” according to reports Page 12. One of the galaxies that is colliding is the spiral NGC 7727, which could easily change its shape once the merger has occurred with its smaller neighbor.
“The image reveals vast, swirling swaths of interstellar dust and gas that look like freshly spun cotton candy as they wrap around the merged nuclei of the original galaxies,” said the team of astronomers at the International Observatory of the same name operated by NOIRLab of NSF (National Science Foundation) and AURA (Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy), authors of this research.
Both galaxies have black holes that will form one of the most impressive catastrophic events we have ever seen. One has 154 million solar masses and the other 6.3 million solar masses; They are separated from each other by approximately 1,600 light years.
Will we see this fusion of the Earth? Unfortunately not. Scientists’ estimates indicate that the complete collision will occur in about 250 million years. At the end of this process the result will be an elliptical galaxy.