Binary black holes in nuclei of extragalactic radio sources

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to analyze VLBI component ejections in extragalactic radio sources to detect binary black hole systems by modeling their orbital and precession effects on jet trajectories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling approach that accounts for binary black hole dynamics and precession to interpret VLBI observations, enabling estimation of system parameters.

Findings

Successfully applied the method to sources 1823+568 and 3C 279.

Estimated binary black hole parameters such as orbital period ratio and mass ratio.

Detected offsets in VLBI component origins indicating binary black hole presence.

Abstract

If we assume that nuclei of extragalactic radio sources contain binary black hole systems, the two black holes can eject VLBI components in which case two families of different VLBI trajectories will be observed. Another important consequence of a binary black hole system is that the VLBI core is associated with one black hole, and if a VLBI component is ejected by the second black hole, one expects to be able to detect the offset of the origin of the VLBI component ejected by the black hole that is not associated with the VLBI core. The ejection of VLBI components is perturbed by the precession of the accretion disk and the motion of the black holes around the center of gravity of the binary black hole system. We modeled the ejection of the component taking into account the two pertubations and present a method to fit the coordinates of a VLBI component and to deduce the characteristics of the binary black hole system. Specifically, this is the ratio Tp/Tb where Tp is the precession period of the accretion disk and Tb is the orbital period of the binary black hole system, the mass ratio M1/M2, and the radius of the Binary Black Hole system Rbin. From the variations of the coordinates as a function of time of the ejected VLBI component, we estimated the inclination angle io and the bulk Lorentz factor gamma of the modeled component. We applied the method to component S1 of 1823+568 and to component C5 of 3C 279.