Astronomers have used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to observe a violent cosmic dance between a suspected pair of supermassive black holes at the heart of a distant galaxy. The evidence for this tryst between cosmic monsters lies in the twisted properties of the jets that erupt around the black holes.
The supermassive black hole pair, or binary, lurks at the heart of the quasar OJ287, located at the center of a galaxy around 1.6 billion light-years away from Earth. Using a level of resolution that would be able to spot a tennis ball on the surface of the moon, the team spotted two shockwaves flowing down the jet of OJ287. The shocks, interestingly, were seen traveling at different speeds. And as they travel, passing through strong magnetic fields, these shockwaves appear to produce a phenomenon never seen before.
