Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of Two Black Holes in Orbit

Astronomers have achieved a groundbreaking milestone by directly observing two black holes orbiting each other in the distant quasar OJ287, located billions of light-years away.

These supermassive black holes complete an orbital cycle every 12 years, engaging in a cosmic dance that has fascinated scientists for decades.

To capture this rare phenomenon, researchers from India’s ARIES (Nainital), TIFR (Mumbai), and global collaborators deployed a powerful network of telescopes. Specifically, they used NASA’s TESS satellite and the RadioAstron space telescope to obtain high-resolution radio images. As a result, the images revealed two distinct points of emission, confirming the presence of both black holes. Remarkably, the smaller black hole launched a jet of high-energy particles that twis