PKS 1302-102

Coordinates: 13^h 05^m 33.01498^s, −10° 33′ 19.4266″

PKS 1302-102 is a quasar with a binary-supermassive black hole pair, located in the Virgo constellation, some 3.5 billion light-years (1.1 gigaparsecs) away. It is the first quasar discovered with two supermassive black holes sitting within its accretion disc.^[2][4] As of 2015, it is one of the few black hole binaries known, and was found in a survey of quasar variability in a group of 20 candidates, and the best candidate known, better than the prior best, OJ 287.^[5] The quasar is hosted by an elliptical galaxy.^[3] There are two neighbouring galaxies near the quasar.^[6]

Binary black hole system

The two supermassive black holes are in the process of merging, and are 180 billion miles (2.9×10¹¹ km) apart,^[2] comparable to the separation between the Sun and the Oort Cloud in our Solar System. They are anticipated to merge within about a million years. The orbiting of the two black holes is causing a 5-year (1884 days) periodic flicker of 14% in the output of the quasar. It is anticipated that when the black holes do merge, it will result in an explosion 100 million times more energetic than a supernova.^[6] This system is important in astrophysics, as the final parsec problem concerning mergers of supermassive black holes remains unsolved.^[7] The nature of the system was spotted in data from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey.^[6]

References

Further reading

• Graham, Matthew J.; Djorgovski, S. G.; Stern, Daniel; Glikman, Eilat; Drake, Andrew J.; Mahabal, Ashish A.; Donalek, Ciro; Larson, Steve; Christensen, Eric (7 January 2015). "A possible close supermassive black-hole binary in a quasar with optical periodicity". Nature. arXiv:1501.01375. doi:10.1038/nature14143. 

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