According to the study, a powerful jet emanating from one of the two black holes within PKS 2131-021 is shifting back and forth due to the pair's orbital motion. The telltale evidence came from radio observations of PKS 2131-021 that span 45 years. The first candidate pair, within a quasar called OJ 287, orbit each other at greater distances, circling every nine years versus the two years it takes for the PKS 2131-021 pair to complete an orbit. Reporting in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers argue that PKS 2131-021 is a very rare candidate for a pair of supermassive black holes caught in the act of merging. Astronomers already knew quasars could possess two orbiting supermassive black holes, but finding direct evidence for this has proved difficult. The quasar observed in the new study, PKS 2131-021, belongs to a subclass of quasars called blazars in which the jet is pointing toward the Earth. In some quasars, the supermassive black hole creates a jet that shoots out at near the speed of light. Quasars are active cores of galaxies in which a supermassive black hole is siphoning material from a disk encircling it. When the pair merge in roughly 10,000 years, the titanic collision is expected to shake space and time itself, sending gravitational waves across the universe.Ī Caltech-led team of astronomers has discovered evidence for this scenario taking place within a fiercely energetic object known as a quasar.

The two giant bodies each have masses that are hundreds of millions of times larger than that of our sun, and the objects are separated by a distance roughly 50 times that which separates our sun and Pluto. Locked in an epic cosmic waltz 9 billion light years away, two supermassive black holes appear to be orbiting around each other every two years. Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships

Largest black hole