The apocalypse is still on, apparently — at least in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from here.

Last winter, a team of Caltech astronomers reported that two supermassive black holes appeared to be spiraling together toward a cataclysmic collision that could bring down the curtains in that galaxy.

Now a new analysis of the system by Daniel D’Orazio a graduate student of Columbia University, and his colleagues Zoltan Haiman and David Schiminovich proposes that most of the light from the quasar is coming from a vast disk of gas surrounding the smaller of the two black holes.

Their model suggests that the black holes are orbiting each other at a distance of some 200 billion miles, less than a tenth of a light-year, a cosmic whisker. At that distance, the black holes would be rapidly losing energy by radiating gravitational waves and could spiral together into the final bang in as little as 100,000 years, Dr. Haiman said, depending on their relative masses.

bbabo.Net