NASA captures two massive black holes 3.5bn light years away from Earth in cosmic dance

Space is a mysterious place where galactic bodies are constantly undergoing mystical phenomena. And now, scientists have discovered two enormous black holes caught up in an endless cosmic dance. The celestial movement is reportedly taking place in the OJ287 galaxy situated 3.5 billion light-years away from Earth.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the two dynamic black holes are at the centre of the galaxy, home to one of the largest black holes ever found. The behemoth black hole weighs over 18 billion times the mass of our Sun and its dancing partner is much smaller yet a huge black hole weighing about 150 million times the Sun's mass.

It was discovered that twice every 12 years, the two black holes come close enough to create a cosmic mega flare. As per the report, the smaller black hole collides with a huge disk of debris surrounding the big black hole and this leads to an explosion that can be viewed from Earth that remains 3.5 billion light-years away from the galaxy. This happens because the explosion is so enormous that it generates a flare that is brighter than one trillion stars.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory captured the phenomenon and posted it online for the public to view the epic cosmic activity. The black holes are caught up in a 12-year loop however, the phenomenon takes place irregularly. Sometimes, it happens at an interval of one year, at other times it could take as long as 10 years.

It took the scientists decades to accurately understand the timing of the occurrence of a mega explosion. However, in 2010, scientists successfully created a model that could predict when the celestial activity would take place again. Even though the model was largely a success with the prediction of appearance of a flare within three weeks, a team of researchers from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India came up with an advanced version of this model in the year 2018. They claimed that it could predict future explosions within four hours and their model was confirmed accurate after they predicted the next flare to occur on July 31, 2019 and NASA's now-retired Spitzer Telescope stood witness to it.

"When I first checked the visibility of OJ 287, I was shocked to find that it became visible to Spitzer right on the day when the next flare was predicted to occur," Seppo Laine, an associate staff scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California said in the statement.

It is said that Spitzer Space Telescope that was launched in 2003 and retired on January 30, was the only telescope with the best view of the galaxy when the flare occurred.

"It was extremely fortunate that we would be able to capture the peak of this flare with Spitzer because no other human-made instruments were capable of achieving this feat at that specific point in time," said.