And you thought rush hour was bad on Earth! New research suggests some"cosmic intersections" have failed"traffic lights" that deem black hole collisions almost inevitable.
Then, thanks to the immense gravitational influence of the traffic-jam-culprit supermassive black hole, a beast that can boast a mass millions of times that of the sun, this process repeats. That results in even more black-hole collisions that create larger and larger stellar-mass black holes over time, with masses between three and a few hundred solar masses.
Some supermassive black holes are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust called an accretion disk; it is this disk which gradually feeds the black hole. The gravity of supermassive black holes generates powerful tidal forces in those accretion disks that cause them to glow brightly, creating a region called an Active Galactic Nucleus .
When stellar-mass black holes sit in these accretion disks, their interactions with the gas surrounding them can cause them to migrate through the disk. The team theorizes that this leads to stellar-mass black holes accumulating in regions they call"migration traps." This makes the possibility of two stellar mass black holes encountering each other, colliding and merging in these regions due to the traffic jam greater than anywhere else in the surrounding galaxy.