Orbit of supermassive black holes confirmed

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes

http://www.phys.unm.edu/~gbtaylor/astr422/ARP/e_0402.pdf

Really cool.

 

[sts60]

Great work. With a 24,000 year orbital period, they have a long ways to go (from our perspective). And I'm glad they're a healthy distance away

 

[quadraginta]

Right now, the Andromeda galaxy, which also has a SMBH at its center, is on a path to collide with our Milky Way, meaning the event Bansal and Taylor are currently observing, might occur in our galaxy in a few billion years.

I wonder if it's too early to get tickets?

I'd sure like to beat the rush.

 

[sphenisc]

Groundbreaking discovery confirms existence of orbiting supermassive black holes

http://www.phys.unm.edu/~gbtaylor/astr422/ARP/e_0402.pdf

Really cool.

The article describes this as a visual binary system, at a distance of 750 million lys that seems unlikely?

 

[Blue Mountain]

While the news is impressive, this smacks too much of "science by press release" for my liking. The first link is to the University of New Mexico, where the research was done. The second link is to a PDF of the paper, but there's no indication of which journal it was published in or submitted to.

 

[This is The End]

The article describes this as a visual binary system, at a distance of 750 million lys that seems unlikely?

   

“When Dr. Taylor gave me this data I was at the very beginning of learning how to image and understand it,” said Bansal. “And, as I learned there was data going back to 2003, we plotted it and determined they are orbiting one another. It’s very exciting.”

The unbelievable size of these black holes means their orbital period is around 24,000 years, so while the team has been observing them for over a decade, they’ve yet to see even the slightest curvature in their orbit.

“If you imagine a snail on the recently-discovered Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri – 4.243 light years away – moving at 1 cm a second, that's the angular motion we're resolving here,” said Roger W. Romani, professor of physics at Stanford University and member of the research team.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

While the news is impressive, this smacks too much of "science by press release" for my liking. The first link is to the University of New Mexico, where the research was done. The second link is to a PDF of the paper, but there's no indication of which journal it was published in or submitted to.

Published in The Astrophysical Journal, which is "a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering astronomy and astrophysics." (Wiki).

 

[SelfSim]

Paper is here on arXiv.

Eta:

... In this study of 0402+379, we have focused on two aspects: frequency dependent core-shift and secular relative core motion. Both effects are observed, but the measured values present interpretation challenges.

Eta#2:

Rodriguez et al. (2006) imaged this source at multiple frequencies, studying the component motion at 5 GHz, but finding no significant detection of core displacement. In this paper, we incorporate new 2009 and 2015 epochs of 0402+379 VLBA observations at 5, 8, 15 and 22 GHz, while re-analyzing the 2003 and 2005 observations. These data show strong evidence for a frequency dependent core-shift effect (Lobanov 1998; Sokolovsky et al. 2011). After accounting for this effect, our data set allows a detection of the relative motion of the two cores, making this the first visual SMBHB.

 

[rjh01]

Just thinking of the stars and gas that are orbiting each of the black holes. When the black holes get too close to each other the orbits of these stars and gas would be crazy. The stars could crash into the black holes or maybe be ejected from the system. Or maybe, if the stars were lucky, into a new orbit that orbits both black holes. I wonder if we would be able to detect anything like this? Maybe the gas?

 

[Blue Mountain]

Published in The Astrophysical Journal, which is "a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering astronomy and astrophysics." (Wiki).

Ah, it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thank you for chasing down the reference.