They found a merging pair of black holes. And they named the formation “Spikey.”

Scientific American introduces us to a a couple of black holes named Spikey:

In 2017 astrophysicists Daniel D’Orazio and Rosanne Di Stefano detailed how a pair of soon to merge supermassive black holes should gravitationally lens one another and how the resulting signal could be seen if the imminent merger’s orbital plane aligned with Earth. Material surrounding the black holes should glow in the x-ray wavelength as it accelerates toward either member of the pair If one black hole passes in front of the other, the immense, spacetime-warping gravitational field of the “foreground” black hole will act much like a lens, magnifying the background light source. “It’s a very distinctive signature,” says Di Stefano, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.

In October, she and D’Orazio, working with several collaborators, reported on the discovery of an object emitting a signal that matches their theoretical prediction. Data gathered in 2011 by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope revealed an unusual AGN with a strange spike. If the object, nicknamed Spikey, repeats its flare again this spring, as predicted by D’Orazio and his colleagues, it will be what he calls the “smoking gun” confirming Spikey is a pair of supermassive black holes on the cusp of merging. D’Orazio, an astronomer at Harvard, presented the new analysis last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu.

The problem comes in the final parsec, where gravity is not strong enough to overcome the centrifugal force of each black hole’s orbit to pull the pair closer together. Without a steady influx of material to shake things up, the two may stop just shy of merging and remain in a holding pattern over the lifetime of the universe. This “final parsec problem” does not affect pairs of smaller, stellar-mass black holes, which can more easily merge by bleeding off excess orbital energy via their copious emission of gravitational waves. But larger black holes need something to push them over that final hump before their own gravitational-wave emission can kick in, at which point an eventual merger becomes inevitable.

“We don’t have a good understanding of what goes on in that final parsec,” says Matthew Graham, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the new study.

According to Di Stefano, the merging black holes might each be ringed by a “mini disk” embedded in a larger shared disk that orbits both objects. The mini disks could dissipate as the black holes gobble them down, only to be occasionally replenished with material from the larger outlying disk. Each black hole munching on a minidisk has a beneficial side-effect, shedding additional orbital energy and allowing the two to spiral closer together, potentially overcoming the final parsec problem. According to the researchers’ models, Spikey should merge in the next 100,000 years or so—an eyeblink on astronomical timescales.