Some 9 billion light-years away, two gargantuan black holes are revolving around one another – and rather ominously.
This dance won’t last forever.
Around 10,000 years from now, the pair will collide.
Each supermassive void is so unfathomably huge, our minds can barely comprehend their heft and reach.
And as it appears, the black holes' spectacle is paralleled by an equally dramatic chronicle of discovery.
An artist’s conception of the binary black hole system revolving around one another.
In short, blazars' jets are pointed directly at Earth.
For years, Readhead successfully monitored about 1,000 of these enormous beams.
Then in 2020, something strange revealed itself.
Sinusoidal patterns essentially look like waves on a diagram going up and down.
it’s possible for you to think of them as having hills and valleys.
Zeroing in on this blip, Readhead checked out how far back the shape goes.
“If it weren’t for her, this beautiful finding would be sitting on the shelf.”
That’s when co-author Roger Blandford, an astrophysicist at Caltech, stepped in.
Artist’s animation of a supermassive black hole circled by a spinning disk of gas and dust.
The black hole is shooting out a relativistic jet – one that travels at nearly the speed of light.
But such skepticism dissolved in 2016.
Thus, scientists need to detect sinusoidal light wave patterns created by black hole jets for abysses any bigger.
