Oh! They don’t mean that black holes must come in perfect pairs! The headline makes it sound like it’s about wormholes across vast distances. No! What they’ve found is a stable “orbit” solution for the two-body problem. Normally when you place two bodies anywhere in an empty universe, they will gravitate towards each other until they collide. But in a universe with dark energy, there is some perfect distance between them, where the accelerating expansion perfectly counterbalances the accelerating attraction. They’ve used general relativity math to actually calculate such an arrangement.

The “stable” orbit in this case is the same kind of stable as a pencil balanced on its sharp tip - if it tilts even slightly one way it will fall out of control. Although they tantalize the idea that they might be able to make it truly stable against small perturbations once they finish their spinning black hole solution.

I would like to have known some specific numbers examples! Like if you have as much dark energy as our universe, and two 10-solar-masses stellar black holes, how far apart would that be? Is it like 1Ly or 1MLy? How far for two 10-million-solar masses supermassive black holes? The formulas they created should give the exact answer but I am not skilled enough to substitute the correct numbers for the letters.

Researchers from the University of Southampton, together with colleagues from the universities of Cambridge and Barcelona, have shown it’s theoretically possible for black holes to exist in perfectly balanced pairs—held in equilibrium by a cosmological force—mimicking a single black hole.

Thanos would be very proud.