Astronomers detect a blazar exhibiting sinusoidal radio variability

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-astronomers-blazar-sinusoidal-radio-variability.html

4 Comments

  1. For anyone wondering.. a blazer, like a quasar, is just a supermassive BH at the center of a galaxy, but the BH is consuming a ton of matter. It gets a huge accretion disc and big relativistic jets. If those jets are pointed right at us, the brightness is insane, and it will vary a lot. So a blasar is just a quasar (feeding SMBH) pointed at us.

  2. Could someone explain why this is evidence for a binary SMBH instead of precession of a single SMBH?

  3. the-software-man on

    Like watching a top spin from above? The axis precesses over time and we see pulsing?