OJ 287: New Testing Ground for General Relativity and Beyond

TL;DR

The paper discusses OJ 287 as a new high-precision testing ground for general relativity and alternative gravity theories, leveraging its relativistic effects and potential to reveal dark matter and dark energy influences.

Contribution

It introduces OJ 287 as a novel astrophysical laboratory for testing gravity theories beyond the solar system with high precision.

Findings

Orbital precession of 40 degrees per period observed.

Gravitational radiation losses are comparable to blazar electromagnetic emission.

Tests of Einstein gravity are accurate to a few percent at cosmological distances.

Abstract

The supermassive short period black hole binary OJ287 is discussed as a new precision testing ground for general relativity and alternate gravity theories. Like in the case of binary pulsars, the relativistic gravity effects are considerably larger than in the solar system. For instance the observed orbital precession is forty degrees per period. The gravitational radiation energy losses are comparable to typical blazar electromagnetic radiation emission and it is about ten orders larger than that of the binary pulsar with significant orbit shrinking already apparent in the light curves. This already tests Einstein gravity to a few percent for objects at cosmological distances. Constraints on alternate gravity theories as well as possible detection of long term effects of dark matter and dark energy on this system are described.