There just aren’t enough superlatives to describe the galaxy OJ 287. It’s a quasar – an especially bright object powered by two supermassive black holes.

One of them is about 150 million times as massive as the Sun. The other is 18 billion times the Sun’s mass – one of the heaviest black holes yet seen. They team up to produce outbursts that are a trillion times brighter than the Sun – brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy combined.

OJ 287 is always bright. But every few years, it flares up – the result of interactions between the black holes.

Each of them is encircled by a giant disk of gas. As the gas spirals in, it gets extremely hot. That makes the disks extremely bright.

The smaller black hole orbits the larger one every 12 years. The orbit is tilted. So every six years, the black hole plunges through the disk around the larger black hole. That can heat some regions to trillions of degrees, producing the flare-ups.

Astronomers recently used radio telescopes to take a picture of the system. They saw a long “jet” of particles from the smaller black hole. The jet is twisted by the interactions between the black holes – confirming the profile of this amazing system.

OJ 287 is in Cancer, which is low in the east at nightfall. Even though it’s billions of light-years away, OJ 287 is bright enough to see through most amateur telescopes.

Script by Damond Benningfield