Evidence of jet activity from the secondary black hole in the OJ287 binary system
Abstract
We report the study of a huge optical intraday flare on November 12, 2021, at 2 am UT, in the blazar OJ287. In the binary black hole model it is associated with an impact of the secondary black hole on the accretion disk of the primary. Our multifrequency observing campaign was set up to search for such a signature of the impact, based on a prediction made eight years earlier. The first I-band results of the flare have already been reported by \cite{2024ApJ...960...11K}. Here we combine these data with our monitoring in the R-band. There is a big change in the R-I spectral index by between the normal background and the flare, suggesting a new component of radiation. The polarization variation during the rise of the flare suggests the same. The limits on the source size place it most reasonably in the jet of the secondary black hole. We then ask why we have not seen this phenomenon before. We show that OJ287 was never before observed with sufficient sensitivity on the night when the flare should have happened according to the binary model. We also study the probability that this flare is just an oversized example of intraday variability, using the Krakow-dataset of intense monitoring between 2015 and 2023. We find that the occurrence of a flare of this size and rapidity is unlikely. In the Appendix, we give the full orbit-linked historical light curve of OJ287 as well as the dense monitoring sample of Krakow.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2405.08627,
title = {Evidence of jet activity from the secondary black hole in the OJ287 binary system},
author = {Mauri J. Valtonen and Staszek Zola and Alok C. Gupta and Shubham Kishore and Achamveedu Gopakumar and Svetlana G. Jorstad and Paul J. Wiita and Minfeng Gu and Kari Nilsson and Alan P. Marscher and Zhongli Zhang and Rene Hudec and Katsura Matsumoto and Marek Drozdz and Waldemar Ogloza and Andrei V. Berdyugin and Daniel E. Reichart and Markus Mugrauer and Lankeswar Dey and Tapio Pursimo and Harry J. Lehto and Stefano Ciprini and T. Nakaoka and M. Uemura and Ryo Imazawa and Michal Zejmo and Vladimir V. Kouprianov and James W. Davidson, and Alberto Sadun and Jan Strobl and Z. R. Weaver and Martin Jelinek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08627},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
to Appear in Astrophysical Journal Letters