In a research paper published under the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists have identified a spectacle that has never been observed before. Tucked approximately 9 billion light-years, these black holes a team of astronomers from Caltech have claimed that these two giant bodies have masses that are hundreds of millions of times greater than that of our Sun. Read below to know all about this mind boggling discovery and all you need to know about the discovered asteroids.
2 tightest-knit supermassive black hole duo observed till date have caught the trace of the scientists. The black holes have been anointed as PKS 2131-021 and OJ 287. 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 there was no sinusoidal signal at all for 20 years before that time until as far back as 1981 when another predicted peak was observed.
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