SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURSTS FROM THE MERGER OF TWO BLACK HOLES

By R. Perna, D. Lazzati, B. Giacomazzo. 2016

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are explosions of cosmic origins believed to be associated with the merger of two compact objects, either two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole (BH). The presence of at least one neutron star has long been thought to be an essential element of the model: its tidal disruption provides the needed baryonic material whose rapid accretion onto the post-merger BH powers the burst. The recent tentative detection by the Fermi satellite of a short GRB in association with the gravitational wave signal GW150914 produced by the merger of two BHs has challenged this standard paradigm. Here, we show that the evolution of two high-mass, low-metallicity stars with main-sequence rotational speeds a few tens of percent of the critical speed eventually undergoing a weak supernova explosion can produce a short GRB. The outer layers of the envelope of the last exploding star remain bound and circularize at large radii. With time, the disk cools and becomes neutral, suppressing the magnetorotational instability, and hence the viscosity. The disk remains “long-lived dead” until tidal torques and shocks during the pre-merger phase heat it up and re-ignite accretion, rapidly consuming the disk and powering the short GRB.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08629f8e01bfc3ced5a1b4f7a8bdf6a79e19bc86

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Citations in the corpus

The effect of pair-instability mass loss on black-hole mergers (2016, background): “…primordial BH-BH formation (Sasaki et al. 2016; Eroshenko 2016), formation of a BH-BH merger from a divided core of a massive rapidly rotating single star (Loeb 2016), or formation of BH-BH mergers with disks around BHs formed from fallback material in weak supernova explosions (Perna et al. 2016).”
Black hole and neutron star mergers in galactic nuclei (2018, background): “While some reservoir of material could still be found around one of the BHs as a dead disk remnant from the SN explosion (Perna et al. 2016), this may not be a common scenario.”
MERGERS OF CHARGED BLACK HOLES: GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE EVENTS, SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURSTS, AND FAST RADIO BURSTS (2016, background): “Alternatively, the magnetosphere may be maintained by a debris disk that is circulating the BH at the time of coalescence (e.g. Perna et al. 2016; Li et al. 2016).”
FERMI GBM OBSERVATIONS OF LIGO GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE EVENT GW150914 (2016, background): “…2016), unusual environments for the black hole merger that may lead to sufficient surrounding material to fuel the production of the GRB (Loeb 2016; Perna et al. 2016), implications of our observation if the association between GW150914 and GW150914-GBM is real (Ellis et al. 2016; Li et al. 2016),…”
Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “SMBHs might be good standard sirens for LISA as well [271].”
Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, background): “…et al. 2010), but is possible if there is surrounding material (Schnittman 2013), for example, remnants of mass lost from the parent star (Perna et al. 2016; Janiuk et al. 2017) or if the binary was embedded in a circumbinary disc or a common envelope (Bartos et al. 2017; Woosley 2016;…”