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General relativity spot on Black holes are firmly established in astronomy and in the public imagination. Yet the concept still depends on the assumption that Einstein's general theory of relativity is the correct theory of gravitation. Tests of general relativity in a strong gravitational field are best conducted in systems containing black holes. Valtonen et al . report such a test in a close binary system of two proposed black holes in the quasar OJ 287. This quasar shows quasiperiodic optical outbursts at 12-year intervals, with two outburst peaks per interval. The latest outburst in September 2007 was within a day of the time predicted by the binary black hole model and general relativity. Tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity in a strong gravitational field may be best conducted in systems containing black holes. Such a test in a close binary system of two proposed black holes in the quasar OJ287 is reported. This quasar shows quasi-periodic optical outbursts at 12 year intervals, with two outburst peaks per interval. The latest outburst occurred in September 2007, within a day of the time predicted by the binary black hole model and the general relativity. Tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity have mostly been carried out in weak gravitational fields where the space-time curvature effects are first-order deviations from Newton’s theory 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . Binary pulsars 4 provide a means of probing the strong gravitational field around a neutron star, but strong-field effects may be best tested in systems containing black holes 7 , 8 . Here we report such a test in a close binary system of two candidate black holes in the quasar OJ 287. This quasar shows quasi-periodic optical outbursts at 12-year intervals, with two outburst peaks per interval 9 , 10 . The latest outburst occurred in September 2007, within a day of the time predicted by the binary black-hole model and general relativity 11 . The observations confirm the binary nature of the system and also provide evidence for the loss of orbital energy in agreement (within 10 per cent) with the emission of gravitational waves from the system 12 . In the absence of gravitational wave emission the outburst would have happened 20 days later 13 .

The ESA-Gaia satellite is regularly producing Alerts on objects where photometric variability has been detected after several passages over the same region of the sky. The physical nature of these objects has often to be determined with the help of complementary observations from ground-based facilities. We have compared the list of Gaia Alerts (from the beginning in 2014 to Nov. 1st, 2018) with archival LAMOST and SDSS spectroscopic data. A search radius of 3″ has been adopted. In using survey data, the date of the ground-based observation rarely corresponds to the date of the Alert, but this allows at least the identification of the source if it is persistent, or the host galaxy if the object was only transient like a supernova (SN). Some of the objects have several LAMOST observations, and we complemented this search by adding also SDSS DR15 data in order to look for long-term variability. A list of Gaia Nuclear Transients (GNT) from Kostrzewa-Rutkowska et al. (Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 481(1):307, 2018) has been included in this search also. We found 26 Gaia Alerts with spectra in LAMOST+SDSS labelled as stars, among which 12 have multi-epoch spectra. A majority of them are Cataclysmic Variables (CVs). Similarly, 206 Gaia Alerts have associated spectra labelled as galaxies, among which 49 have multi-epoch spectra. Those spectra were generally obtained on a date widely different from the Alert date, and are mostly emission-line galaxies with no particularity (except a few Seyferts), leading to the suspicion that most of the Alerts were due to a SN. As for the GNT list, we found 55 associated spectra labelled as galaxies, among them 13 with multi-epoch spectra. In these two galaxy samples, in only two cases, Gaia17aal and GNTJ170213+2543, was the date of the spectroscopic observation close enough to the Alert date: we find a trace of the SN itself in their LAMOST spectrum, both being now classified here as a type Ia SN. Compared to the galaxy sample from the Gaia alerts, the GNT sample has a higher proportion of AGNs, suggesting that some of the detected variations are also due to the AGN itself. Similarly for Quasars, we found only 30 Gaia Alerts but 68 GNT cases associated with single epoch quasar spectra in the databases. In addition to those, 12 plus 23 are quasars where multi-epoch spectra are available. For ten out of these 35, their multi-epoch spectra show appearance or disappearance of the broad Balmer lines and also variations in the continuum, qualifying them as “Changing Look Quasars” and therefore significantly increasing the available sample of such objects.

The majority of Fermi-LAT detected (2FGL) sources are AGN, mostly blazars. However, the second largest category in the 2FGL are unassociated sources (~30% or 575 sources), whose multi-wavelength counterpart is either inconclusive or absent. Follow-up observations and archival data at X-ray, optical, and radio frequencies suggest that many unassociated 2FGL sources are strong candidates to be AGN. Typical observed characteristics of 2FGL detected AGN include variability at all frequencies and a spectral energy distribution (SED) with two “bumps”; a low-frequency synchrotron peak in the radio to optical/X-ray region and a high-frequency peak, possibly due to synchrotron self-Compton or Inverse Compton processes, that extends up to TeV energies. We present optical follow-up observations of a sample of Fermi unassociated sources with one or more potential X-ray counterparts detected within the LAT error circle.

Interstellar scintillation (ISS) has been shown to be primarily responsible for the short term intraday variability (IDV) exhibited by extragalactic sources at centimeter wavelengths (e.g. Bignall et al. 2006 and references therein). For a source to scintillate its angular size must be comparable to that of the first Fresnel zone (Narayan 1992) which implies microarcsecond angular sizes for screen distances of tens to hundreds of parsecs. This has the potential to probe within a few light months of the central black hole (Bignall et al. 2006). The aim of the Microarcsecond Scintillation-Induced Variability (MASIV) survey was to provide a catalogue of at least a hundred AGNs that vary on timescales of hours to days to provide the basis of detailed studies of the IDV population drawn from a well-defined sample.

The Micro-arcsecond Scintillation-Induced Variability (MASIV) Survey and its follow-up observations have provided large datasets of AGN intra-day variability (IDV) at radio wavelengths. These data have shown that IDV arises mainly from scintillation caused by scattering in the ionized interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy, based on correlation with Galactic latitudes and line-of-sight Galactic electron column densities. The sensitivity of interstellar scintillation (ISS) towards source angular sizes has provided a new tool for studying the most compact components of radio-loud AGNs at microarcsecond (μas) scale resolution - much higher than any ground-based radio interferometer. We present here key results from the MASIV Survey and its follow-up observations, and point to relevant papers where these results have been published.

Tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity have mostly been carried out in weak gravitational fields where the space-time curvature effects are first-order deviations from Newton's theory. Binary pulsars provide a means of probing the strong gravitational field around a neutron star, but strong-field effects may be best tested in systems containing black holes. Here we report such a test in a close binary system of two candidate black holes in the quasar OJ287. This quasar shows quasi-periodic optical outbursts at 12-year intervals, with two outburst peaks per interval. The latest outburst occurred in September 2007, within a day of the time predicted by the binary black-hole model and general relativity. The observations confirm the binary nature of the system and also provide evidence for the loss of orbital energy in agreement (within 10 per cent) with the emission of gravitational waves from the system. In the absence of gravitational wave emission the outburst would have happened 20 days later.

We have obtained high‐resolutionR‐band images of three BL Lacertae objects, Mrk 421, Mrk 501, and 1ES 2344+514, that have been detected at high‐energy (TeV) γ‐rays. Because of their TeV emission, these three objects have been targets of intensive optical monitoring during the last few years. We have studied the morphology of host galaxies by fitting ellipses and two‐dimensional galaxy+core models to the observed surface brightness distribution. We find the host galaxies to be large (effective radii 7–40 kpc) and bright ( \\documentclass{aastex} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{bm} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{pifont} \\usepackage{stmaryrd} \\usepackage{textcomp} \\usepackage{portland,xspace} \\usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \\usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \\newcommand\\cyr{ \\renewcommand\\rmdefault{wncyr} \\renewcommand\\sfdefault{wncyss} \\renewcommand\\encodingdefault{OT2} \\normalfont \\selectfont} \\DeclareTextFontCommand{\\textcyr}{\\cyr} \\pagestyle{empty} \\DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \\begin{document} \\landscape $M_{R}=-23.2$ \\end{document} to −24.6) elliptical galaxies, whose surface brightness distribution can be described by a single power law \\documentclass{aastex} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{bm} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{pifont} \\usepackage{stmaryrd} \\usepackage{textcomp} \\usepackage{portland,xspace} \\usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \\usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \\newcommand\\cyr{ \\renewcommand\\rmdefault{wncyr} \\renewcommand\\sfdefault{wncyss} \\renewcommand\\encodingdefault{OT2} \\normalfont \\selectfont} \\DeclareTextFontCommand{\\textcyr}{\\cyr} \\pagestyle{empty} \\DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \\begin{document} \\landscape $I( r) \\propto r^{-\\beta }$ \\end{document} with \\documentclass{aastex} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{bm} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{pifont} \\usepackage{stmaryrd} \\usepackage{textcomp} \\usepackage{portland,xspace} \\usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \\usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \\newcommand\\cyr{ \\renewcommand\\rmdefault{wncyr} \\renewcommand\\sfdefault{wncyss} \\renewcommand\\encodingdefault{OT2} \\normalfont \\selectfont} \\DeclareTextFontCommand{\\textcyr}{\\cyr} \\pagestyle{empty} \\DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \\begin{document} \\landscape $\\beta =0.10$ \\end{document} –0.36 to an accuracy of ∼0.2 mag. The isophotes of the host galaxies are found to be ellipses with no apparent “boxyness” or “diskyness.” The host galaxies of Mrk 501 and 1ES 2344+514 also exhibit a position angle twist that increases linearly with distance from the nucleus. Using the two‐dimensional photometric decomposition we have constructed tables of host galaxy magnitude as a function of measuring aperture diameter and seeing. These tables can be used to “clean” photometric data of the host galaxy contribution.

The discovery that interstellar scintillation (ISS) is suppressed for compact radio sources at z ≳ 2 has enabled ISS surveys to be used as cosmological probes. We discuss briefly the potential and challenges involved in such an undertaking, based on a dual-frequency survey of ISS carried out to determine the origin of this redshift dependence.

We present a summary of the campaign of remote observations that supported the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. Telescopes across the globe (and in space) followed comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from before Rosetta's arrival until nearly the end of the mission in September 2016. These provided essential data for mission planning, large-scale context information for the coma and tails beyond the spacecraft and a way to directly compare 67P with other comets. The observations revealed 67P to be a relatively 'well-behaved' comet, typical of Jupiter family comets and with activity patterns that repeat from orbit to orbit. Comparison between this large collection of telescopic observations and the in situ results from Rosetta will allow us to better understand comet coma chemistry and structure. This work is just beginning as the mission ends--in this paper, we present a summary of the ground-based observations and early results, and point to many questions that will be addressed in future studies. This article is part of the themed issue 'Cometary science after Rosetta'.

The results of multicolor observations of the blazar 3C 66A, obtained in the course of the project OJ-94, are analyzed. It is established that the energy distribution of the variable source in the optical and IR ranges can be represented, on the average, by a power law: Fν ν^sup -0.92^. Since the blazar's emission is strongly polarized, there is no doubt of the synchrotron nature of the variable source responsible for the blazar's activity.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]