It's interesting that this has made it to HN! My research is on the dynamics of few body systems so I know OJ 287 well! One of the projects I've been wanting to work on but haven't gotten around to is about this system. As the article mentions, OJ 287 is strange because it is a blazar (which is very rare, since the outflow has to be pointed directly at us) and is in a binary (which is also rare), yet it also happens to be the largest black hole known in the universe! So one could say that there's a low prior for such a system to exist.<p>The reason that OJ 287 has to be so massive in this model is because the orbit of the secondary black hole precesses so rapidly. For GR to give you that precession rate, you need a very, very massive black hole.<p>An alternative model I would like to explore is a three-body model for OJ 287. If this black hole binary is orbited by a tertiary black hole, the tertiary can also induce precession in the inner binary, so OJ 287 would not need to be so massive, which would make the triple model more plausible. It's unclear yet whether the triple dynamics can reproduce the observed lightcurve of OJ 287, though, so this is just an idea that's been on my to-do list for a year now. Let me know if you have any questions!
> While the ellipse that Mercury’s orbit makes around the Sun precesses at a rate of 43"-per-century due to relativistic effects (where 1° is 3600"), this smaller black hole should precess at 39°-per-orbit, and should inspiral in to the larger one in a timeframe of just a few thousand years!<p>In case anyone's curious: The double-quote is an arc-second. When measuring angles, a single quote is an arc-minute, which is 1/60th of a degree. An arc-second is, of course, 1/60th of an arc-minute. Rifle accuracy is measured in minutes of arc, with 1' being about an inch diameter circle at 100 meters. Proxima Centauri has a parallax of about 0.8".<p>To give you an idea of how far away Proxima Centauri is, we can scale everything down. A light-year is about 63,240 AU. A mile is 63,360 inches. So if Terra was an inch from Sol, Proxima Centauri would be about 4 miles away. The parallax from Proxima Centauri is the same as if you looked at an object 4 miles away, then moved your head 2 inches laterally. That's 0.8 arc-seconds. That's the second-closest star to us.
It not the complete list: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes#List" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_hole...</a><p>On a related note, I never understood how a black hole (or frozen stars like the Russians call them) could potentially orbit or be swallowed by another black hole. If they "infinitely" deform space-time, shouldn't they be unable to move at all? If time stands still past the event horizon as they say and they also rip the space-time fabric so much, they shouldn't be able to "get out of the hole". This is just too mind-bogging for me I guess.
The animation blew my mind. Especially S0-16. What the heck was that thing's velocity at perihelion? A <i>whole star</i> moving that much, that fast, accelerating like that in only 16 years. An entire star, tossed about in space like a ragdoll.
Made me think if this: <a href="http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY&feature=kp" rel="nofollow">http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY&feature=kp</a><p>Also, helps to remind me of how cosmically tiny the problems of building my SaaS product really are.
That blazar picture - it would be nice if articles would always credit it as 'artist's conception'. It almost looked like a feasible real light image with the pixellation, so I was rather intrigued.
Here is the one thing that really keeps me awake at night: what if our science was the equivalent of a bunch of ants in a typical ant hill in anyone of our backyards, defining a mechanism or "method" through which they have explained for themselves the nature of the solar system?<p>That's the one thing. And I can't shake it off.
<i>this smaller black hole should precess at 39°-per-orbit, and should inspiral in to the larger one in a timeframe of just a few thousand years!</i><p>So we are just incredible lucky to be here at this moment to have observed it? Fascinating.
Wow. In my memory, it was the pressure from the hot gases that kept a star from collapsing on itself. I did not know it was light pressure! Is this a typo in the article, or is it really light pressure holding up stars?
what superenergetic catastrophe happens when those two black holes collapse onto each other?<p>Is this black hole pair likely to be two galactic cores that collided, and captured each other due to some sort of inelastic interaction (maybe ejecting stars out?) and their surrounding galactic matter got eaten up due to basically the three-body problem?
Well, I'm having a nice big existentialist crisis right now having being reminded of our place in the universe. I'm going to go pour myself a whiskey and hug my kids. G'night everybody.