Abstract
Modeling trajectories of radio components ejected by the nucleus of 4C31.61 (2201+315) and observed by very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) in the frame of the MOJAVE survey suggests that they are ejected from three different origins that possibly host three different supermassive black holes. These origins correspond to three stationary components, one of which one is the VLBI core. Most of the mass of the nucleus is associated with a supermassive binary black hole system whose separation is ≈0.3 milliarc second, that is, a distance of ≈1.3 parsec and the mass ratio is ≈2. In contrast, the mass ratio with respect to the third black hole is ≈1/100. The three origins lie within 0.6 milliarc second, or a distance of ≈2.6 parsec. Based in this structure of the nucleus, we explain the variations observed in the astrometric coordinate time series obtained from VLBI geodetic surveys. This study shows that it is possible to exploit large MOJAVE-like VLBI databases to propose more insights into the structure of the extragalactic radio sources that are targeted by VLBI in geodetic and astrometry programs.
Highlights
Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of nuclei of extra galactic radio sources show that the ejection of VLBI components does not follow a straight line, but wiggles
We find by fitting the ejection of VLBI components of the two families that if one family is characterized by the mass ratio M1/M2 = a, where M1 and M2 are the masses of the two black hole (BH), the second family is characterized by the inverse mass ratio 1/a, showing the consistency of the binary black hole (BBH) model
The analysis of MOJAVE model fit data with our minimization method suggests that none of components C6, C7, and C13 can be ejected by a single spinning BH, but that they are ejected by BBH systems and that the nucleus of 2201+315 contains three BHs
Summary
We calculated the curve χ2(io), which corresponds to the χ2 of the model of the VLBI component ejection for a given inclination angle io. With the mass ratio MC3/(MC0 + MC9) < 0.05 have a minimum, but solutions with MC3/(MC0 + MC9) ≥ 0.05 do not have a minimum because when io becomes smaller than about 4.8◦, the radius of the accretion disk diverges and becomes larger than the BBH system RG−C3 (see Fig. D.2).
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