Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:

Two supermassive black holes will collide in 10,000 years, warping space and time.

A Cosmic Collision in the Making

In a galaxy 9 billion light-years away, two enormous black holes are locked in a cosmic dance that will eventually end in a massive collision. These supermassive black holes, each hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun, are currently orbiting one another. In about 10,000 years, they will merge in a violent event, unleashing enough force to distort space and time by creating gravitational waves—ripples in the universe’s fabric.

One proposed way of examining if such a force could exist is by closely monitoring asteroid trajectories, and few near-Earth asteroids are as well observed as Bennu. A new study by an international team of scientists analyzes Bennu to try and placing constraints on a possible fifth fundamental force in the search of ultralight dark matter.

Bennu, one of the most dangerous near-Earth objects, has been meticulously tracked by optical and radar astrometric data since it was discovered in 1999. As the destination for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid retrieval mission, additional X-band radiometric and optical navigation tracking data added even more trajectory precision. The idea is that any deviation in the expected trajectory of the asteroid could be the result of an unknown fifth force at work. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications Physics.

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time.