A long-suspected black hole may have finally come out of hiding.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said astronomer Mauri Valtonen on June 7 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque.
Astronomers have been watching this object since the 1880s, when it showed up in a survey of asteroids as a brilliant point of light. That point of light, now dubbed OJ287, is a blazar. Among the brightest-looking objects in the universe, blazars are supermassive black holes that launch bright jets of radiation into space, and those jets happen to point almost directly at Earth. This one sits about 3.5 billion light-years away.
Sometimes, OJ287 shines even brighter than usual. For the past 40 years or so, astronomers have noticed that the object has a dramatic jump in brightness every 11 to 12 years.
2023-06-15 08:00:00
Post from www.sciencenews.org
