Exotic 'blazar' is part of most extreme double black hole system ever found, crooked jet suggests

By Keith Cooper published 2 days ago

"Its special properties make the galaxy an ideal candidate for further research into merging black holes and the associated gravitational waves."



A glowing string of orange and yellow gas in the darkness of space, with a yellow end on the left showing a gas jet of a black hole

A radio-wavelength image of the crooked jet beaming out from the supermassive black hole system OJ 287. (Image credit: Dr Efthalia Traianou, Heidelberg University, IWR)


A beam of particles speeding away from the vicinity of a monstrous black hole has been found to be severely kinked, providing compelling evidence that the black hole is actually part of the most extreme binary system known.

The black hole and its crooked jet are found in a blazar known as OJ 287, located about four billion light-years away. A blazar is a quasar seen head-on, and a quasar is the active core of a galaxy where the resident supermassive black hole is pulling in huge amounts of matter. That matter spirals around the black hole, forming what’s called an accretion disk, and there’s so much matter that the accretion disk becomes a bottleneck.

Rather than flowing into the black hole’s maw, the infalling matter piles up in the disk, the density and temperature dramatically increasing such that it shines so brightly that it can be seen across the universe. Magnetic fields wrapped up in the accretion disk are able to funnel some of the charged particles in the matter away from the black hole, collimating them and accelerating them in two opposing jets that blast away from the black hole for thousands of light-years at close to the speed of light. Because we see blazars almost head-on, they appear even brighter than regular quasars.

However, OJ 287 is not your ordinary blazar. Astronomers have been tracking its cycles of brightness variations for about 150 years — from even before they knew what kind of object it is. There’s a long cycle of approximately 60 years, and a shorter cycle with a period of variation of just 12 years.

More:
https://www.space.com/astronomy/black-holes/exotic-blazar-is-part-of-most-extreme-double-black-hole-system-ever-found-crooked-jet-suggests