Conveners
Binary SMBH
- chair: Barbara Balmaverde
Binary SMBH
- chair: Barbara Balmaverde
Periodic signatures in time-domain observations of quasars have been used to search for binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs). These searches, across existing time-domain surveys, have produced several hundred candidates. The general stochastic variability of quasars, however, can masquerade as a false-positive periodic signal, especially when monitoring cadence and duration are limited. In...
We report the discovery of a transient source in the ZTF public alert stream, whose location coincides with the nucleus of a $z<0.1$ Seyfert galaxy. After the initial alert, the source has increased its brightness by up to half a magnitude five times, roughly every hundred days. While the periodic behaviour suggests a super-massive black hole binary, archival data shows that before the alert...
Binaries containing a compact object orbiting a supermassive black hole are thought to be the precursors of gravitational wave events, but their electromagnetic identification has been extremely challenging. ASASSN-20qc is an optical astrophysical flare that originated from the nucleus of a seemingly quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 0.056. An extensive multi-wavelength follow-up campaign...
A model is proposed for finding the parameters of close binary systems of supermassive black holes based only on observational data in the radio range. The methodology for determining the physical characteristics of the binary systems of supermassive black holes includes conducting harmonic and wavelet analyses, determining the masses of the satellites and their orbital characteristics. It is...
