In a research paper published under the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists have identified a spectacle that has never been observed before. They are located approximately 9 billion light-years from Earth, and astronomers have claimed that these black holes have masses that are hundreds of millions of times greater than that of our Sun. Read on to learn more about this mind-boggling discovery and all you need to know about the discovered asteroids.
Researchers have caught a glimpse of the tightest-knit supermassive black hole duo yet observed. The black holes have been assigned the PKS number 2131-021 and the OJ number 28. OJ 287, exhibits periodic radio-light variations. These fluctuations are more irregular, and not sinusoidal, but they suggest the black holes orbit each other every nine years. As for the case of PKS 2131-021,it orbits each other every two years and are 2,000 astronomical units apart, about 50 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. To understand in layman terms the distance for the latter is 10 to 100 times closer than the pair in OJ 287.
About the research team who led this remarkable research
The research for the same was led by a professor who goes by the name of S. O’Neill. He was assisted by a team of researchers namely S. Kiehlmann, A. C. S. Readhead and six others. The research team then went through archival radio data to look for past peaks in the light curves that matched predictions based on the more recent OVRO observations. First, data from NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array and UMRAO revealed a peak from 2005 that matched predictions. The UMRAO data further showed no sinusoidal signal for 20 years before that time until as far back as 1981 when another predicted peak was observed.