{"id":66447,"date":"2025-10-10T19:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T19:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/66447\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T19:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T19:28:07","slug":"radioastron-captures-radio-image-of-two-supermassive-black-holes-circling-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/66447\/","title":{"rendered":"RadioAstron Captures Radio Image of Two Supermassive Black Holes Circling Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using data from the RadioAstron satellite, astronomers have produced a radio image of two supermassive black holes at the center of the distant quasar OJ 287<\/a>, where the secondary black hole is in a 12-year orbit around the primary.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a><\/p>\n

This RadioAstron map two supermassive black holes at the center of OJ 287, a galaxy located about 5 billion light-years away in the constellation of Cancer: if the central component corresponds to the primary black hole, then the next one upwards marks the secondary black hole, and the highest component represents a knot in its jet; the elongation of the individual components is not real, but is a reflection of the beam shape. Image credit: Valtonen et al., doi: 10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae057e.<\/p>\n

Quasars are extremely bright galactic cores, whose light is produced when a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy devours the cosmic gas and dust around it.<\/p>\n

In the past, astronomers have managed to image the black hole in the center of the Milky Way and in a nearby galaxy called Messier 87.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuasar OJ 287 is so bright that it can be detected even by amateur astronomers with private telescopes,\u201d said Dr. Mauri Valtonen, an astronomer at the University of Turku.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is special about OJ 287 is that it has been thought to harbor not one but two black holes<\/a> circling each other in a 12-year orbit, which produces an easily recognizable pattern of light variations in the same period.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe earliest observations of OJ 287 can be traced through old photographs all the way to the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBack then, however, it was inconceivable that black holes existed, let alone quasars.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOJ 287 was \u2018accidentally\u2019 included in pictures while astronomers focused on other objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

As early as 1982, Dr. Valtonen noticed that the brightness of the object changed regularly over a 12-year period.<\/p>\n

He went on to study OJ 287 as a university researcher, assuming that the brightness variation was caused by two black holes orbiting each other.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of astronomers have been intensively monitoring the quasar to see if the theory is correct and to get a complete picture of the black holes\u2019 orbital motion.<\/p>\n

The mystery of the orbit was finally solved four years ago by University of Turku astronomer Lankeswar Dey.<\/p>\n

The only question that remained was whether both black holes could be detected at the same time.<\/p>\n

It was answered by NASA\u2019s TESS satellite that detected light from both black holes.<\/p>\n

However, they were still only visible as a single dot, because images using normal light do not have high enough resolution to show the black holes separately.<\/p>\n

What was needed was an image with 100,000 times higher resolution, which is possible with radio telescopes.<\/p>\n

In the current study, Dr. Valtonen and colleagues compared the earlier theoretical calculations with a radio image.<\/p>\n

The two black holes were there in the image, just where they were expected to be.<\/p>\n

This gave the researchers an answer to a question that has been open for 40 years: whether black-hole pairs exist in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time, we managed to get an image of two black holes circling each other,\u201d Dr. Valtonen said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the image, the black holes are identified by the intense particle jets they emit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe black holes themselves are perfectly black, but they can be detected by these particle jets or by the glowing gas surrounding the hole.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scientists also identified a completely new kind of a jet emanating from a black hole.<\/p>\n

The jet coming out of the secondary black hole in OJ 287 is twisted like a jet of a rotating garden hose.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is because the smaller black hole moves fast around the primary black hole, and its jet is diverted depending on its current motion,\u201d the authors said.<\/p>\n

Their paper<\/a> was published in the Astrophysical Journal.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Mauri J. Valtonen et al. 2025. Identifying the Secondary Jet in the RadioAstron Image of OJ 287. ApJ 992, 110; doi: 10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae057e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Using data from the RadioAstron satellite, astronomers have produced a radio image of two supermassive black holes at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[48130,48131,1560,48132,1745,85,46,21058,48133,30978,39257,48134,48135,141,13854],"class_list":{"0":"post-66447","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-binary-black-hole","9":"tag-binary-supermassive-black-hole","10":"tag-black-hole","11":"tag-cosmic-jet","12":"tag-galaxy","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-jet","16":"tag-oj-287","17":"tag-quasar","18":"tag-radio-signal","19":"tag-radioastron","20":"tag-relativistic-jet","21":"tag-science","22":"tag-supermassive-black-hole"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}