Dance of black holes | NASA Captures Two Dancing Black Holes That Combine To Create A Flare Brighter Than 1 Billion Stars

About 3.5 billion light-years away, two black holes are trapped in an apparently endless formation, like they’re dancing. The supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy OJ 287 and is approximately 18 billion times more massive than our Sun and is one of the largest black holes ever found. The dance partner’s black hole is much smaller, approximately 150 million times larger than our Sun.

This happens every 12 years, when the smallest black hole crashes into a massive pile of debris around the largest black hole. The debris field is called an accretion disk, and when the smallest black hole collides with it, it creates an explosion of light that’s brighter than 1 trillion stars.

NASA captured the phenomenon in this animated video below.

However, the timing is not perfect. The smallest black hole crashes into the largest at irregular intervals of time because it has an oblong orbit. This makes it difficult for scientists to figure out exactly when the next light burst occurs. In 2010, a team of researchers tried to create a model to predict when the mega flare would happen next. The correctly created model predicted the appearance of an outbreak in three weeks.

Then in 2018, several scientists at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, refined the model to predict the next flare that they said would peak on July 31, 2019. They claimed that if they could observe it. gives an opportunity to prove the “no hair theorem” that states that black holes are smooth and symmetrical.