SECULAR EVOLUTION OF COMPACT BINARIES NEAR MASSIVE BLACK HOLES: GRAVITATIONAL WAVE SOURCES AND OTHER EXOTICA

By F. Antonini, H. Perets. 2012

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The environment near supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei contains a large number of stars and compact objects. A fraction of these are likely to be members of binaries. Here we discuss the binary population of stellar black holes and neutron stars near SMBHs and focus on the secular evolution of such binaries, due to the perturbation by the SMBH. Binaries with highly inclined orbits with respect to their orbit around the SMBH are strongly affected by secular Kozai processes, which periodically change their eccentricities and inclinations (Kozai cycles). During periapsis approach, at the highest eccentricities during the Kozai cycles, gravitational wave (GW) emission becomes highly efficient. Some binaries in this environment can inspiral and coalesce at timescales much shorter than a Hubble time and much shorter than similar binaries that do not reside near an SMBH. The close environment of SMBHs could therefore serve as a catalyst for the inspiral and coalescence of binaries and strongly affect their orbital properties. Such compact binaries would be detectable as GW sources by the next generation of GW detectors (e.g., advanced-LIGO). Our analysis shows that ∼0.5% of such nuclear merging binaries will enter the LIGO observational window while on orbits that are still very eccentric (e ≳ 0.5). The efficient GW analysis for such systems would therefore require the use of eccentric templates. We also find that binaries very close to the SMBH could evolve through a complex dynamical (non-secular) evolution, leading to emission of several GW pulses during only a few years (though these are likely to be rare). Finally, we note that the formation of close stellar binaries, X-ray binaries, and their merger products could be induced by similar secular processes, combined with tidal friction rather than GW emission as in the case of compact object binaries.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07bc36d00d4b04cbd094d86aa2e8c4f2f9023535

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. F. Antonini
2. Michela Mapelli
3. F. Rasio
4. Ilya Mandel
5. B. Kocsis
6. N. Giacobbo
7. D. Holz
8. Mario Spera

In Instrumentation

1. P. Hopkins
2. N. Murray
3. Michela Mapelli
4. F. Rasio
5. L. Hernquist
6. F. Antonini
7. S. Naoz
8. T. Thompson

Citations in the corpus

• The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “…to that of the formation of blue stragglers may operates in the Galactic center, where the massive black hole in the center of the galaxy causes large eccentricity excitations on a stellar binary in its vicinity (e.g., Antonini and Perets 2012; Prodan et al. 2015, Stephan et al. in Prep.).”
• Black hole and neutron star mergers in galactic nuclei (2018, background): “1 pc; Antonini & Perets 2012; Hoang et al. 2018; Fragione et al. 2018; Hamers et al. 2018).”
• Merging Binaries in the Galactic Center: The eccentric Kozai-Lidov mechanism with stellar evolution (2016, methodology): “E-mail: alexpstephan@astro.ucla.edu 1 If the GC is relaxed, a dense, mass-segregated cusp of stellar mass BHs is expected near the MBH. the GC are a potential source of gravitational wave (GW) emission (e.g., O’Leary et al. 2009; Antonini & Perets 2012).”
• Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, methodology): “Furthermore, Antonini & Perets (2012) used the semi-analytical timescale given in Thompson (2011) to estimate the merger timescale.”
• BLACK HOLE TRIPLE DYNAMICS: A BREAKDOWN OF THE ORBIT AVERAGE APPROXIMATION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTIONS (2013, methodology): “The employment of an N−body integrator is motivated by a recent study of Antonini & Perets (2012) who have shown, in the context of BH binary mergers in galactic nuclei, that the orbit averaged approximation breaks down for highly inclined but stable configurations if the binary comes closer to the…”
• BLACK HOLE MERGERS AND BLUE STRAGGLERS FROM HIERARCHICAL TRIPLES FORMED IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2015, background): “For example, Antonini & Perets (2012), Seto (2013) and Antonini et al. (2014) demonstrated that in this non-secular regime, a compact object binary can be pushed inside the 10 Hz gravitational wave (GW) frequency band of Advanced Ligo (aLIGO) detectors with a finite eccentricity.”
• Eccentric Black Hole Gravitational-wave Capture Sources in Galactic Nuclei: Distribution of Binary Parameters (2017, methodology): “BH binaries in orbit around a supermassive BH (SMBH) in galactic nuclei (GNs) also represent hierarchical triples (Antonini & Perets 2012; VanLandingham et al. 2016; Petrovich & Antonini 2017; Hoang et al. 2018; Randall & Xianyu 2018a, 2018b).”
• Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “…may operate in a number of regimes, from isolated stellar triples (Silsbee and Tremaine, 2017) to dynamically formed triples in clusters (Antonini et al., 2016) to triples in which the outer companion is a massive black hole in a galactic center (Antonini and Perets, 2012; Hoang et al., 2018).”
• RESONANT POST-NEWTONIAN ECCENTRICITY EXCITATION IN HIERARCHICAL THREE-BODY SYSTEMS (2012, background): “Also, recently Antonini & Perets (2012) showed that secular three-body effects play an important role in the evolution of binary compact objects near SMBH. GWs emitted during Kozai-Lidov–induced, highly eccentric orbits of compact binaries might be detectable using LIGO5 and VIRGO6 (e.g., Wen 2003…”
• Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, background): “Including the contribution from NCs hosting a massive BH could increase these rates significantly (O’Leary et al. 2009; Antonini & Perets 2012; VanLandingham et al. 2016; Petrovich & Antonini 2017; Hamers et al. 2018).”
• The evolution of hierarchical triple star-systems (2016, background): “However, whereas the orbit-averaged equations of motion are valid for strongly hierarchical systems, they become inaccurate for triples with weaker hierarchies (e.g. Antognini et al., 2014; Antonini and Perets, 2012; Antonini et al., 2014; Bode and Wegg, 2014; Katz and Dong, 2012; Luo et al., 2016; ”
• MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS (2016, methodology): “MBH-mediated BH mergers in NSCs Antonini & Perets (2012) showed that near a MBH the dynamical evolution of binaries is dominated by perturbations from the central MBH.”
• Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, background): “…binaries will in fact have higher eccentricities as they enter the aLIGO band and a higher chance of merging than what we would predict based on the standard secular equations of motion (Antonini & Perets 2012; Katz & Dong 2012; Antonini et al. 2014; Antognini et al. 2014; Antonini et al. 2016).”
• Lidov–Kozai Cycles with Gravitational Radiation: Merging Black Holes in Isolated Triple Systems (2016, background): “As is stated in Antonini & Perets (2012) and Katz & Dong (2012), the inner binary is actually able to explore more of thephase space than it does in the double-averaged approximation used to derive Equation (14) because of variations in the inner orbit on the timescale of the outer orbital period.”
• Rapid Eccentricity Oscillations and the Mergers of Compact Objects in Hierarchical Triples (2013, background): “These effects can also produce interesting gravitational wave signatures from stellar mass binaries in orbit around one or more SMBHs (e.g., Antonini & Perets 2012; Nate Bode & Wegg 2013).”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…2013; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016a; Mapelli 2016; Askar et al. 2017; Banerjee 2017; Chatterjee et al. 2017) and galactic nuclei (Antonini & Perets 2012; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Petrovich & Antonini 2017), evolution of hierarchical triple systems(Antonini et al. 2014, 2017;…”