A beam of particles speeding away from the vicinity of a monstrous black hole has been found to be severely kinked, providing compelling evidence that the black hole is actually part of the most extreme binary system known.
The black hole and its crooked jet are found in a blazar known as OJ 287, located about four billion light-years away. A blazar is a quasar seen head-on, and a quasar is the active core of a galaxy where the resident supermassive black hole is pulling in huge amounts of matter. That matter spirals around the black hole, forming what’s called an accretion disk, and there’s so much matter that the accretion disk becomes a bottleneck.
