'For Love and Glory' by Poul Anderson (2003)
Excerpt
Shrouded in fire, the black holes sped to their destiny. Minute by minute, second by second, they swelled in sight, blazed more wildly brilliant, roared the louder throughout every spectrum of radiance. The discs were swirling storms, riven, aflare with eerie lightnings. Vast tatters broke off, exploded into flame, torrented back down or threw red spindrift across heaven before vanishing into vacuum. It was as if the stars, their light rays bent, scattered terrified from around those masses...
The black holes met.
Nobody in real time saw that. It was too swift. At one heartheat they were well apart, at the next they blurred into streaks, and then light erupted. White it was at the cente, raw sun-stuff; thence it became night-violet, dusk-violet, day-blue, steel-blue, gold-yellow, brass-yellow, blood-red, sunset-red. Outward and outward it bloomed. The fringes were streams, fountains, lace in a wind. They arced over and began to return in a million different, pure mathematical curves....
The Science
No one has ever seen two black holes merge, but Anderson’s description is reasonable. The accretion disks around merging black holes certainly would stage some pyrotechnics. What you wouldn’t see, but would feel from close range (as Anderson describes in the book) would be powerful “ripples” in spacetime caused by the merger. Known as gravitational waves, they might be powerful enough for Earth-based instruments (or future space-based ones) to detect, particularly for mergers inside the Milky Way or nearby galaxies.
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