optical outburst of OJ287 tagged posts

An illustration of the binary black hole system in OJ287. The predictions of the model are verified by observations. Credit: Gary Poyner, UK

An international team using several optical telescopes and NASA’s SWIFT X-ray telescope. The rotational rate of this massive black hole is 1/3 of the maximum spin rate allowed in General Relativity. This 18 billion solar mass heavy black hole powers a quasar OJ287 which lies about 3.5 billion light years away from Earth. This quasar lies very close to the apparent path of the Sun’s motion on the celestial sphere as seen from Earth, where most searches for asteroids and comets are conducted. Therefore, its optical photometric measurements already cover more than 100 years...