Why It’s Hard for Black Holes to Get Together
It begins like a classic romance: Two black holes meet. The attraction is practically instant. They dance around each other, swirling closer and closer, until ...
Until what? As with any love affair, this is where things get messy.
First predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are bottomless pits in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational wells so deep that nothing, not even light, can escape. Little black holes, trapping the mass of just a few suns, litter the universe like silent land mines, while the biggest ones, the supermassive black holes, occupy the center of nearly every galaxy, hoovering up torrents of infalling matter. These giants contain as much mass as hundreds of millions of suns; astronomers think that they formed from a long chain of galactic mergers—dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of happy unions stretching back to the early days of the universe.
“Our whole picture of the formation of the structure of the universe involves this hierarchical process of small galaxies merging together to form large
