Close supermassive binary black holes.

It has been proposed that when the peaks of the broad emission lines in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are significantly blueshifted or redshifted from the systemic velocity of the host galaxy, this could be a consequence of orbital motion of a supermassive black-hole binary (SMBB). The AGN J1536+0441 ( = SDSS J153636.22+044127.0) has recently been proposed as an example of this phenomenon. It is proposed here instead that J1536+0441 is an example of line emission from a disk. If this is correct, the lack of clear optical spectral evidence for close SMBBs is significant, and argues either that the merging of close SMBBs is much faster than has generally been hitherto thought, or if the approach is slow, that when the separation of the binary is comparable to the size of the torus and broad-line region, the feeding of the black holes is disrupted.