Tag: astronomy

startswithabang:

Meet The Universe’s First-Ever Supermassive Binary Black Holes

“In 1891, the object OJ 287, 3.5 billion light years distant and a blazar itself, optically bursted. Every 11-12 years since, it’s produced another burst, recently discovered to have two, narrowly-separated peaks. Its central, supermassive black hole is 18 billion solar masses, one of the largest known in the Universe. This periodic double-burst arises from a 100-150 million solar mass black hole punching through the primary’s accretion disk.”

The big problem with black holes is that, well, they’re so dark. They don’t emit any detectable light of their own, so we have to rely on indirect, secondary signals to infer their existence. That usually arises in the form of radio and X-ray radiation from matter that gets accelerated by the black hole’s extreme gravity, as well as from the magnetic fields that an accretion disk around the black hole can create. The radiation can form jets, and when a jet points at our eyes, we see a blazar. Well, the system OJ 287 has a periodic blazar that flares in a double-burst every 11-12 years, indicative of a large, supermassive black hole orbiting an even more massive behemoth, punching through the accretion disk twice with every orbit.

Come meet OJ 287, first found to burst way back in 1891, and still one of only two supermassive black hole binaries known in the Universe!