Two Super Massive Black Holes will merge within the year 2022 !!

So we have the light curves of the glowing gas surrounding a supermassive black hole being regularly occulted by something else deduced to be another supermassive black hole ie. they orbit each other. That regularity is becoming quicker in recent years - less time b/w occultations implying an inspiral course - and modelling places a merger as likely in the near term ( from May onwards this year ) but uncertainties/alternatives could prolong that estimate to several times that. It will be the first BH-BH collision for which the progenitors were known/studied. That's exciting. What a shame we can't tease out inspirals in our work here at E@H. But anyway this BH-BH system has frequencies out of LIGO range I think.

It is worth while to mention that one theory of how supermassive blackholes form is that they gain their mass predominantly by merging with other black holes, and not much by steady addition of material from an accretion disk. Seeing the above BH-BH merger would confirm that view.

I wonder if Ladbrokes would take a wager on this ..... ;-)

Cheers, Mike.