The smaller black hole was captured with a jet of near-light speed particles twisting around like a rotating garden hose or a dog’s wagging tail. The larger black hole, producing a bigger cosmic fountain known as the blazar OJ287, is a supermassive monster with a mass roughly 18 billion times greater than our sun. The researchers published their findings Oct. 9 in The Astrophysical Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “For the first time, we managed to get an image of two black holes circling each other,” study first author Mauri Valtonen<\/a>, an astronomer at the University of Turku in Finland, said in a statement<\/a>. “In the image, the black holes are identified by the intense particle jets they emit. The black holes themselves are perfectly black, but they can be detected by these particle jets or by the glowing gas surrounding the hole.”<\/p>\n Black holes<\/a> are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. For some of these gluttonous space-time ruptures, friction causes the material spiraling into their maws to heat up and emit light that telescopes can detect, turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN).<\/p>\n The most extreme AGN are quasars \u2014 supermassive black holes billions of times heavier than the sun<\/a> that shed their gaseous cocoons by shooting out light blasts trillions of times more luminous than the brightest stars. When these jets are pointed toward Earth\u2019s line of sight, they are known as blazars.<\/p>\n Astronomers have previously imaged the supermassive giants at the center of our Milky Way<\/a> and in the nearby galaxy Messier 87<\/a>, and ample evidence also exists for the existence of black hole binaries and their mergers through detections of gravitational waves<\/a>. Yet despite long-held suspicions that OJ287 contained an orbiting pair, telescopes lacked the resolution to separate them from a single dot.<\/p>\n
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