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Astronomers have made groundbreaking discoveries regarding the binary supermassive black hole system in the active galaxy OJ 287, located approximately 5 billion light-years away. The system contains a primary black hole with a mass of 18 billion solar masses and a secondary black hole of 150 million solar masses, which orbits the primary every 12 years. Recently, in 2021/2022, researchers successfully detected direct signals from the secondary black hole for the first time. The study confirmed longstanding predictions of flares produced when the secondary black hole plunges through the accretion disk of the primary, producing significant bursts of light.
The observational campaigns, conducted since the 1970s, collected data from a range of telescopes, corroborating the binary model of OJ 287. Notably, new types of flares were observed, including a brief flare 100 times more luminous than an entire galaxy, and a gamma-ray flare linked to the secondary black hole’s interaction with the disk gas. As research continues, OJ 287 is emerging as a prime candidate for studying gravitational waves and the dynamics of supermassive black hole pairs, with ongoing monitoring by international scientific collaborations.
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