Flaring radio lanterns along the ridge line: long-term oscillatory motion in the jet of S5 1803+784

TL;DR

This study analyzes 18 years of VLBI data of S5 1803+784, revealing a 6-year oscillatory motion in its jet, likely caused by binary black hole orbital motion, affecting jet component variability and Doppler boosting.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed long-term analysis linking jet oscillations to binary black hole dynamics in S5 1803+784.

Findings

Jet exhibits 6-year oscillatory motion superimposed on helical kinematics.

Jet component position variability increases with distance from the core.

Flux variability is influenced by jet structure evolution and intrinsic changes.

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of 30 very long baseline interferometric observations of the BL Lac object S5 1803+784 (z=0.679), obtained between mean observational time 1994.67 and 2012.91 at observational frequency 15 GHz. The long-term behaviour of the jet ridge line reveals the jet experiences an oscillatory motion superposed on its helical jet kinematics on a time-scale of about 6 years. The excess variance of the positional variability indicates the jet components being farther from the VLBI core have larger amplitude in their position variations. The fractional variability amplitude shows slight changes in 3-year bins of the component's position. The temporal variability in the Doppler boosting of the ridge line results in jet regions behaving as flaring "radio lanterns". We offer a qualitative scenario leading to the oscillation of the jet ridge line, that utilizes the orbital motion of the jet emitter black hole due to a binary black hole companion. A correlation analysis implies composite origin of the flux variability of the jet components, emerging due to possibly both the evolving jet-structure and its intrinsic variability.