Bright lights detected by NASA telescopes lead to a dancing pair of supermassive black holes

Two telescopes have spotted the closest pair of supermassive black holes to date. The duo, only about 300 light-years apart, were observed in different wavelengths of light using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and kra 4 the Hubble Space Telescope.

While black holes are invisible against the dark void of space, these two blaze brightly as the gas and dust they feed on is accelerated and heated to high temperatures. Both celestial objects, which circle around one another, are known as active galactic nuclei.

Active galactic nuclei are supermassive black holes that release bright jets of material and high winds that can shape the very galaxies where they are found.

The black hole duo is the closest pair found through visible and X-ray light. While other black hole pairs have been observed before, they are usually much farther apart. Astronomers discovered these black holes dancing around one another at the center of a pair of colliding galaxies called MCG-03-34-64, which is 800 million light-years away.

Astronomers serendipitously found the black holes when Hubble’s observations revealed three spikes of bright light within the glowing gas of a galaxy. They published their discovery Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.