Black hole binary OJ287 as a testing platform for general relativity

TL;DR

The paper discusses using the binary black hole system OJ287 as a natural laboratory to test general relativity by analyzing jet wobble influenced by orbital motion.

Contribution

It introduces a method to infer the orbital motion of the secondary black hole from jet wobble observations in OJ287.

Findings

Jet wobble reflects orbital position dependence.

Erratic jet wobble component is very small.

Binary nature explains jet behavior.

Abstract

The blazar OJ287 is the most promising (and the only) case for an extragalactic binary black hole system inspiralling under the action of gravitational radiation reaction. At present, though it is not possible to directly observe the binary components, it is possible to observe the jet emanating form the primary black hole. We argue that the orbital motion of the secondary black hole is reflected in the wobble of the jet and demonstrate that the wobble is orbital position dependent. The erratic wobble of the jet, reported in Agudo et al. (2012), is analyzed by taking into account the binary nature of the system and we find that the erratic component of jet wobble is very small.