International Study Observes Smaller Black Hole in Pair for the First Time

GG News Bureau
New Delhi, 19th July. An international team of 32 scientists from 10 countries has achieved a groundbreaking discovery by directly observing a smaller black hole in a binary black hole system for the first time. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveals the presence of a smaller black hole orbiting a larger one in the distant galaxy OJ 287, located about four billion light-years away.

The study builds on theories initially proposed by astronomers at the University of Turku, Finland, which were later confirmed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS, originally designed to find exoplanets, spent several weeks studying OJ 287 in 2021 and detected a significant increase in brightness, indicating the presence of the smaller black hole.

The breakthrough came when TESS observed a 12-hour burst of light, which researchers attributed to the smaller black hole interacting with the accretion disk of the larger black hole. This sudden burst, never before seen in OJ 287, revealed the smaller black hole’s presence through a temporary shift in the galaxy’s color from red to yellow.

This observation was predicted by Pauli Pihajoki’s 2014 doctoral dissertation and was further confirmed by observations from NASA’s Swift telescope and a global network of telescopes led by Staszek Zola from Jagiellonian University, Poland. The polarization of light before and after the flare, studied by a team from Boston University, also supported the discovery.

The researchers, including Shubham Kishore and Alok C. Gupta from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, India, and Paul Wiita from The College of New Jersey, USA, have demonstrated that the burst originated from the smaller black hole’s interaction with the larger black hole’s accretion disk.

Professor Mauri Valtonen of the University of Turku highlighted the challenge of capturing a direct image of the smaller black hole due to the immense distance. However, the discovery of nano-Hertz gravitational waves from OJ 287, expected to be detectable by future pulsar timing arrays, could provide additional evidence of the smaller black hole’s existence.