In a research paper published under the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists have identified a spectacle never seen before. These black holes, hidden about 9 billion light-years away, have claimed that these two gigantic bodies have masses hundreds of millions of times that of our sun, according to a team of astronomers at Caltech. Read all about this mind-boggling discovery and everything you need to know about the discovered asteroids below.
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2 most close supermassive black hole duos to date have caught the scientists’ trail. The black holes are anointed as PKS 2131-021 and PB 287. PB 287 exhibits periodic radio light variations. These fluctuations are more irregular and not sinusoidal, but they suggest that 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 is 2,000 astronomical units apart, about 50 times the distance between the sun and Pluto. To understand in layman’s terms, the distance for the latter is 10 to 100 times smaller than the pair in PB 287.
About the research team that led this remarkable study
The research for this was led by a professor named S. O’Neill. He was assisted by a team of researchers, namely S. Kiehlmann, ACS Readhead and six others. The research team then went through archive radio data to look for peaks in the past 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 2005 peak that matched predictions. The UMRAO data further showed that there was no sinusoidal signal at all for 20 years prior to that time, until 1981 when another predicted peak was observed.
Image source: Representative