WHEN BLACK HOLES MERGE

A pair of supermassive black holes are closing together in separate colliding galaxies, giving astronomers their best ever view of such a merger. In a tangled mass of dense gas and dust, the two behemoths are set to coalesce into one mega black hole, an event ready to be captured in nearinfrared images using adaptive optics at the WM Keck Observatory on Hawaii. The two galactic nucleii glow brilliantly as the black holes gorge on gas from merging galaxy NGC 6240 in Ophiuchus.