Brilliant new signals from a far-off galaxy confirm that the system is anchored by a pair of black holes locked in a daring dance.
Mysterious flares in the sky brighter than a trillion suns are actually the glow from two distant black holes circling one another, astronomers confirmed in new observations that solve a decades-old mystery.
New research finds that galaxy OJ 287, which sits 5 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer, is anchored by two black holes, one supermassive and one smaller. Though these two black holes look like one dot on telescope imagery, they send out different kinds of electromagnetic signals, allowing astronomers to untangle their respective identities.
The galaxy was discovered in 1888, and astronomers have suspected for decades that it might be a binary system, with two black holes at its core. The galaxy shows a pattern of emissions that vary on two separate cycles, one 12 years long and the other 55 years long, suggesting two separate types of motion are occurring — one, the orbit of a black hole around another; the other, the slow change in the orientation of that orbit.
