Scientists Solve 135-Year-Old Mystery: The Perfect Flash in Space is Two Black Holes Orbiting Each Other

• Astrophysicists have been observing the perfect flash since 1888
• But only now have they found out what causes it

A strange flash in space brighter than a trillion suns is actually the glow of two black holes orbiting each other. That’s according to the latest scientific observation that has solved a 135-year-old mystery.

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Scientists discovered the perfect flash

The universe is full of mysteries, and one of the more complicated riddles has recently been solved by scientists. They found that the galaxy OJ 287, located 5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer, is anchored by two black holes, one supermassive and one smaller.

Although the two black holes look like a single point in telescope images, they emit different kinds of electromagnetic signals, making it easier for astronomers to detect them. OJ 287 was discovered as early as 1888, and scientists suspected for decades that it might be a binary system with two black holes at its core. However, they were not 100% sure.

The galaxy OJ 287 shows a pattern of emission that varies in two separate cycles, one lasting 12 years and the other 55 years, suggesting that two separate types of motion are occurring – one is the black hole orbiting the other, the other is a slow change in orientation of this track.

“Years of observations have revealed flares that occur when one black hole dives into the accretion disk of another black hole—the vast rings of matter swirling around supermassive black holes—heating the dust and gas in the disk, creating bursts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum,” the server writes. Live Science.

These flashes are brighter than a trillion stars and last for about two weeks. Now, however, scientists have observed two more dramatic and much shorter flashes that have confirmed the existence of two black holes. During observations from 2021 to 2022, scientists led by astronomer Staszek Zola of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, observed a flash that released 100 times more energy than the entire galaxy, but lasted just one day. NASA’s Fermi telescope also recorded a second, similarly brief gamma-ray burst.

The dance of two black holes

Scientists have calculated that the smaller black hole in OJ 287 is about 150 million times more massive than our Sun. The first flash happened because new gas got to her that she could swallow, which led to the formation of a jet. It then passed through the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole with a mass 18 billion times that of the Sun, interacting with the disk and producing a gamma-ray burst that was detected by the Fermi telescope, the researchers said.

“OJ 287 was photographed as early as 1888 and has been intensively observed since 1970,” said study lead author Mauri Valtonen of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. “It turns out we were just unlucky. “No one observed OJ 287 at the exact moment when the flash lasted just one day,” he added, explaining why it took so many years before the existence of two black holes was definitively confirmed.

Preview photo source: NASA, source: Live Science