Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87
Abstract
The nearby radio galaxy M87 offers a unique opportunity to explore the connections between the central supermassive black hole and relativistic jets. Previous studies of the inner region of M87 revealed a wide opening angle for the jet originating near the black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope resolved the central radio source and found an asymmetric ring structure consistent with expectations from General Relativity. With a baseline of 17 years of observations, there was a shift in the jet's transverse position, possibly arising from an eight to ten-year quasi-periodicity. However, the origin of this sideways shift remains unclear. Here we report an analysis of radio observations over 22 years that suggests a period of about 11 years in the position angle variation of the jet. We infer that we are seeing a spinning black hole that induces the Lense-Thirring precession of a misaligned accretion disk. Similar jet precession may commonly occur in other active galactic nuclei but has been challenging to detect owing to the small magnitude and long period of the variation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2310.09015,
title = {Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87},
author = {Yuzhu Cui and Kazuhiro Hada and Tomohisa Kawashima and Motoki Kino and Weikang Lin and Yosuke Mizuno and Hyunwook Ro and Mareki Honma and Kunwoo Yi and Jintao Yu and Jongho Park and Wu Jiang and Zhiqiang Shen and Evgeniya Kravchenko and Juan-Carlos Algaba and Xiaopeng Cheng and Ilje Cho and Gabriele Giovannini and Marcello Giroletti and Taehyun Jung and Ru-Sen Lu and Kotaro Niinuma and Junghwan Oh and Ken Ohsuga and Satoko Sawada-Satoh and Bong Won Sohn and Hiroyuki R. Takahashi and Mieko Takamura and Fumie Tazaki and Sascha Trippe and Kiyoaki Wajima and Kazunori Akiyama and Tao An and Keiichi Asada and Salvatore Buttaccio and Do-Young Byun and Lang Cui and Yoshiaki Hagiwara and Tomoya Hirota and Jeffrey Hodgson and Noriyuki Kawaguchi and Jae-Young Kim and Sang-Sung Lee and Jee Won Lee and Jeong Ae Lee and Giuseppe Maccaferri and Andrea Melis and Alexey Melnikov and Carlo Migoni and Se-Jin Oh and Koichiro Sugiyama and Xuezheng Wang and Yingkang Zhang and Zhong Chen and Ju-Yeon Hwang and Dong-Kyu Jung and Hyo-Ryoung Kim and Jeong-Sook Kim and Hideyuki Kobayashi and Bin Li and Guanghui Li and Xiaofei Li and Zhiyong Liu and Qinghui Liu and Xiang Liu and Chung-Sik Oh and Tomoaki Oyama and Duk-Gyoo Roh and Jinqing Wang and Na Wang and Shiqiang Wang and Bo Xia and Hao Yan and Jae-Hwan Yeom and Yoshinori Yonekura and Jianping Yuan and Hua Zhang and Rongbing Zhao and Weiye Zhong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.09015},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
41 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables