![]() Researchers now think this regular variation is the result of a second black hole tugging on the first as they orbit each other about every two years. But this particular blazar exhibits a strange behavior: Its brightness shows regular ups and downs as predictably as the ticking of a clock. Located about 9 billion light-years from Earth, PKS 2131-021 is one of 1,800 blazars that a group of researchers at Caltech in Pasadena has been monitoring with the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in Northern California for 13 years as part of a general study of blazar behavior. Astronomers call supermassive black holes with jets oriented toward Earth blazars, and a blazar named PKS 2131-021 is at the heart of this recent paper. A jet pointed toward Earth appears far brighter than a jet pointed away from Earth. These jets can stretch for millions of light-years. Black holes don’t emit light, but their gravity can gather disks of hot gas around them and eject some of that material into space. Joseph Lazio and Michele Vallisneri, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, provided insight into how supermassive black holes behave in a binary system and how to interpret the radio data.Įvidence that this supermassive black hole may have a companion comes from observations by radio telescopes on Earth. So this pair is more than 99% of the way to a collision. That might seem like a long time, but it would take a total of about 100 million years for black holes of this size to begin orbiting one another and finally come together. If the team is correct, the diameter of the binary’s orbit is 10 to 100 times smaller than the only other known supermassive binary, and the pair will merge in roughly 10,000 years. ![]() The enormous duo – called a binary – circle one another about every two years. While they think most resulted from at least one merger between two smaller supermassive black holes, scientists lacked the observations that could give insight, since only one pair of supermassive black holes on the way to a merger had been found.Ī new study may change that: Researchers observing a supermassive black hole report signs that it has a closely orbiting companion. ![]() Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun lie at the heart of most galaxies, and astronomers are eager to know how these behemoths came to be. ![]()
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