When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Images of the twisted jet of matter OJ287 erupting from a distant black hole as seen by the EHT. | Credit: EHT Collaboration / E. TraianouAstronomers have used the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to observe a violent cosmic dance between a suspected pair of supermassive black holes at the heart of a distant galaxy. The evidence for this tryst between cosmic monsters lies in the twisted properties of the jets that erupt around the black holes.The supermassive black hole pair, or binary, lurks at the heart of the quasar OJ287, located at the center of a galaxy around 1.6 billion light-years away from Earth. Using a level of resolution that would be able to spot a tennis ball on the surface of the moon, the team spotted two shockwaves flowing down the jet of OJ287. The shocks, interestingly, were seen traveling at different speeds. And as they travel, passing through strong magnetic fields, these shockwaves appear to produce a phenomenon never seen before.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis is just the latest major black hole breakthrough delivered by the EHT, which in April 2017 captured the first-ever image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole M87*, released to the public in 2019. The network of telescopes followed this up with an image of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s own supermassive black hole, which the public got to see in 2022.Since then, the EHT has continued to make waves in black hole science.”This result shows that the EHT is not only useful for producing spectacular images, but can also be used to understand the physics that govern black hole jets,” EHT team member Mariafelicia De Laurentis said in a statement. “Distinguishing observationally between what is due to geometry and what is instead the result of real physical processes is a key step in comparing theoretical models with observations.”Snapshots of a black hole jetThe team captured two snapshots of the OJ287 system on April 5, 2017, and then on April 10 in the same year. These revealed substantial changes in both the structure and polarization of the OJ287 that occurred over the course of just five Earth days. That is the shortest interval over which such changes have been observed in a black hole jet.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThese changes are thought to be the result of shocks interacting with instabilities in velocity called Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. They result in a highly twisted structure within a jet, with three distinct polarized components: two slower and rotating in opposite directions to one another, one faster and rotating counterclockwise. This represented the first direct confirmation of a helical magnetic field with th …
