Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2024

T his is an artist’s depiction of a pair of active black holes at the heart of two merging galaxies. They are both sur- rounded by an accretion disk of hot gas. Some of the material is ejected along the spin axis of each black hole. Confined by powerful magnetic fields, the jets blaze across space at nearly the speed of light as devastat- ing beams of energy. [NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)]