Astronomers have captured a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other for the first time, just six years after the release of the first-ever photo of a single black hole.
The discovery confirms that pairs of supermassive black holes really do exist — something scientists have suspected for decades but never directly seen until now.
The system lies at the heart of a brilliant space object called quasar OJ 287, about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Quasars, a portmanteau for “quasi-stellar objects,” are extremely bright galaxy cores powered by black holes feasting on surrounding gas and dust. OJ 287 has long stood out because its brightness rises and falls every 12 years. That pattern was a clue that two giant black holes might be circling one another like in a cosmic do-si-do.
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