![]() ![]() “The stability of the period over this 20-year gap strongly suggests that this harbors not one supermassive black hole, but two supermassive black holes orbiting each other.” “The clock kept ticking,” Caltech astronomer and study co-author Tony Redhead said in a press release. The researchers believe this was most likely due to changes in how black holes fuel themselves. Luckily, because astronomers have been keeping track of PKS 2131-021 for the last 45 years, the team was able to find the pattern popping up in data between 19, before it mysteriously disappeared for two decades. This suggested the quasar was being jostled around by more than one supermassive black hole. The researchers first came across this discovery back in 2020, when a powerful jet of light emanating from PKS 2131-021 appeared to be shifting back and forth like a ticking clock. The black holes are separated by a distance that’s 50 times longer than the expanse between the sun and Pluto.Īnd in 10,000 years, they’re going to smash into each other in one hell of a spectacle. ![]() ![]() ![]() In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday, a group of astronomers discovered evidence for two supermassive black holes orbiting around each other every two years in a quasar named PKS 2131-021, nine billion light-years away. It’s been thought possible that a quasar could be powered by multiple supermassive black holes, but we’ve never found good evidence of this. Most quasars have just one supermassive black hole. Later, they were labeled “quasi-stellar radio sources,” or quasars for short.Īstronomers would eventually learn that quasars are the superheated cores of some galaxies, powered by supermassive black holes that are millions or billions of times more massive than the sun. As radio astronomy boomed in the 1950s, these intensely shiny pinpricks of light were first thought to be stars billions of light-years away. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Quasars are some of the most powerful objects in the cosmos. Rees, Gravity’s Fatal Attraction, 2nd ed. A popular account closely related to the subject of this essay is Mitchell Begelman and Martin J. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov, Introduction to Black Hole Physics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). Monographs on black holes include Subrahman yan Chandrasekhar, The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Valeri P. Wald, General Relativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Hartle, Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity (San Francisco: Addison-Wesley, 2003) Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry (San Francisco: Addison-Wesley, 2004) and Robert M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) James B. 1Textbooks on general relativity include Bernard Schutz, A First Course in General Relativity, 2nd ed.And since the general theory of relativity provides only a single unique. An eloquent tribute to the austere mathematical beauty of these objects is given by the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the prologue to his monograph The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes: “The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. Remarkably, an isolated, uncharged black hole is completely characterized by only two parameters: its mass and its spin (or angular momentum). Although black holes are an inevitable consequence of Einstein’s theory, their main properties were only understood–indeed, the name was only coined–a half-century after Einstein’s work. More precisely, a black hole is a singularity in space-time surrounded by an event horizon, a surface that acts as a perfect one-way membrane: matter and radiation can enter the event horizon, but, once inside, can never escape. Black holes are among the most alien predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity: regions of space-time in which gravity is so strong that nothing –not even light–can escape. ![]()
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