Updated: December 15, 2020, 1:22:47 PM
Supermassive black holes are the largest types of black holes, millions of times as massive as the sun.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently shared pictures of two supermassive black holes being merged and it received numerous comments on social media.
The official Instagram account of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shared two images that showed two supermassive black holes merging.
According to the post, the black holes in Galaxy NGC 6240 are 3,000 light years apart and will drift together in millions of years to form a larger black hole.
According to a blog post by the observatory, the merging process began about 30 million years ago
The blog post also states that pairs of massive black holes in the merging process are likely to be the strongest sources of gravitational waves in the universe.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a telescope specially designed to capture X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe such as exploded stars, galaxy clusters, and matter around black holes.
The telescope, with a 139,000 km orbit in space, was launched by NASA on board the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999 during STS-93.
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For the uninitiated, supermassive black holes, the largest types of black holes are millions of times as massive as the sun.
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