SPACE
Scientists found a way for two black holes to orbit each other forever without colliding
WORDS SHARMILA KUTHUNUR
Artist’s impression of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other
A stronomers have long assumed that two black holes that circle close to each other are always destined to become one in a cataclysmic merger that spans aeons. But that needn’t always be the case, recent research finds. Physicists found that it is theoretically possible for two black holes to remain at a fixed distance from each other thanks to their mutual gravitational pull being perfectly counterbalanced by the speed at which the universe is expanding. “Viewed from a distance, a pair of black holes whose attraction is offset by cosmic expansion would look like a single black hole,” said Óscar Dias, a physicist at the University of Southampton. “It might be hard to detect whether it is a single black hole or a pair of them.”