Mysterious flares in the sky brighter than a trillion suns are actually the glow from two distant black holes circling one another, astronomers confirmed in new observations that solve a decades-old mystery.
New research finds that galaxy OJ 287, which sits 5 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer, is anchored by two black holes, one supermassive and one smaller. Though these two black holes look like one dot on telescope imagery, they send out different kinds of electromagnetic signals, allowing astronomers to untangle their respective identities.
