Flash of Light Brighter Than a Trillion Stars Leads to Supermassive Black Hole Breakthrough — First Detection of Secondary |
Artistic illustration of OJ287 as a binary black hole system. The secondary black hole of 150 million solar masses moves around the primary black hole of 18 billion solar masses. A disk of gas surrounds the latter. The secondary black hole is forced to impact on the accretion disk twice during its 12-year orbit. The impact produces a blue flash which was detected in February 2022.
The active galaxy OJ 287 lies in the direction of the constellation Cancer at a distance of about 5 billion light-years and has been observed by astronomers since 1888. Already more than 40 years ago, astronomer from the University of Turku Aimo Sillanpää and his associates noticed that there is a prominent pattern in its emission which has two cycles, one of about 12 years and the longer of about 55 years.
Successful observational campaigns in 1983, 1994, 1995, 2005, 2007, 2015, and 2019 allowed the team to observe the predicted flares and to confirm the presence of a supermassive black hole pair in OJ 287. “The two black holes are so close to each other in the sky that one cannot see them separately, they merge to a single point in our telescopes. Only if we see clearly separate signals from each black hole can we say that we have actually “seen” them both,” says the lead author, Professor Mauri Valtonen.
“According to the estimates, the flare occurred shortly after the smaller black hole had received a massive dose of new gas to swallow during its plunge. It is the swallowing process that leads to the sudden brightening of OJ287. It is thought that this process has empowered the jet which shoots out from the smaller black hole of OJ 287. An event like this was predicted ten years ago, but has not been confirmed until now,” Valtonen explains.
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