Finnish astronomers have captured the first-ever radio image of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other, confirming a decades-old theory.
The pair is situated inside a bright quasar called OJ287, which is located about 5 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer.
This discovery, published on October 9 in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by Mauri Valtonen, an astronomer at the University of Turku, Finland.
“For the first time, we managed to get an image of two black hole s circling each other. In the image, the black holes are identified by the intense particle jets they emit,” he said.
“The black hole s themselves are perfectly black, but they can be detected by these particle jets or by the glowing gas surrounding the hole,” he added.
The two black hole s