Witness our future.
As a would-be hobbyist astronomer who can’t afford decent equipment, I’m quite fond of stories of new space revelations, such as the binary black holes discovered recently that hint at a phenomenon that may very well occur to our own galaxy in the future.
This is cool on a number of levels. For one, it shows us that two active black holes can co-exist in the center of a galaxy. Two, it shows us what might happen to the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy sometime in the future. Three, it’s a reminder that we’re looking at something that probably already happened - given the extreme distance we are from the observed binary black holes, what we’re observing happened quite a long time ago. In essence, we’re looking into the past, while at the same time, looking into one of our own possible futures. Finally, it suggests that this galactic merger will impact the rest of the universe via some sort of energy wave, as the merger of these two black holes will release energy that travels across the galactic disc. How this will impact us, specifically, is another mystery to be considered.
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