300 million light years away, these two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other. They are at the core of two merging galaxies and are shooting out large amounts of hot gas that is millions of degrees. They are so massive that they are pulled by each other's gravity even at 25,000 light years apart. They are in the Abell 400 galaxy cluster and are moving at around 1200 km per second. Since black holes do not emit visible light, the blue background is actually an x-ray image, and the pinkish gas trails are radio waves. The swept-back look that the trails have allows astronomers to see which way the black holes are moving. When these two collide, they will let out an incredible amount of gravitational waves. These waves actually bend the space-time continuum and shift the distances between objects. By the time they reach us, the event will be unnoticeable to everything other than very advanced detectors.
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