Double Down

A pair of supermassive black holes prepares to merge in this artist's concept. Astronomers recently revealed this system, which is the closest pairing of two supermassive black holes yet seen. The one at left is viewed almost edge-on, so we see a disk of hot gas around it with jets of charged particles shooting away, toward top and bottom, at a large percentage of the speed of light. The larger black hole is seen from the pole, with the space around it being warped by the black hole's gravity. The black holes are separated by 200 to 2,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, and orbit each other once every two years. The system is about 8.8 billion light-years away. [Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)]