The First-Ever Image of Twin Black Holes Comes From the Heart of a Quasar

[Buster's Uncle]

The First-Ever Image of Twin Black Holes Comes From the Heart of a Quasar
Graham Templeton
Extreme Tech
Tue, October 14, 2025 at 4:45 PM EDT
3 min read



(Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)


Binary black holes have been big news in astronomy for a while now, but that's primarily due to their role as the targets of gravitational wave detectors. They've been proven to exist, but, as with so many aspects of modern astrophysics, they have not been directly imaged with light—until now.

Researchers from Finland's University of Turku have published a radio image of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other with a roughly 12-year period. They live inside a quasar, the ultra-luminous black hole-based center of a galaxy, which had long been believed to house two black holes, rather than just one.

The particular quasar in question, called OJ287, has been known for the better part of 150 years and has long been observed to have peaks and troughs in brightness. The pattern was believed to be due to the motion of a binary black hole system hidden behind the quasar's blinding brightness, which peaks higher than the combined luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy.



binary supermassive black hole photo


This figure shows the hard-to-parse but still incredible achievement of the radio image. Credit: University of Turku

With their photo, taken in the radio range of the electromagnetic spectrum, they not only achieve a satisfyingly intuitive proof of the existence of this black hole pair (and of black hole pairs in general), but also discover a new attribute of binary black holes: a "wagging tail."

This refers to the jet of matter stretching out from both black holes, which was used to identify them in the first place. These jets are known features of some black holes, blasting matter out from the poles at nearly the speed of light and driven by the swirling of matter around the outside of the singularity.

Because of the speed of revolution in this binary system, however, the tail from the smaller black hole is deformed and seems to "wag" back and forth. As the smaller black hole moves through its orbit, momentum whips the jet around like a stream of water from a garden hose.

The "smaller" black hole, by the way, has something like 150 million times the mass of the Sun.



Abstract though it may be, this image clearly shows the existence of a jet of matter coming from the smaller black hole. Credit: University of Turku


The radio image was possible thanks to a complex of telescopes on Earth and in orbit. In particular, it used old data previously collected by the now-defunct Russian Spektr-R satellite, which had a high orbit that let it take extremely clear images. In principle, it had hundreds of times higher resolution than Hubble, but only in the radio range of the spectrum.

In the past, conventional optical telescopes could not differentiate between the two bodies, imaging them both as a single dot of light. By using radio telescopes, scientists achieved the resolution necessary to differentiate between them.

Black hole science is evolving with every day, and this image will help to continue that trend in the coming years.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/first-ever-image-twin-black-204527849.html