Rapid and Bright Stellar-mass Binary Black Hole Mergers in Active Galactic Nuclei

By Imre Bartos, B. Kocsis, Zoltán Haiman, Szabolcs Márka. 2016

450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) found direct evidence for double black hole binaries emitting gravitational waves. Galactic nuclei are expected to harbor the densest population of stellar-mass black holes. A significant fraction ( ) of these black holes can reside in binaries. We examine the fate of the black hole binaries in active galactic nuclei, which get trapped in the inner region of the accretion disk around the central supermassive black hole. We show that binary black holes can migrate into and then rapidly merge within the disk well within a Salpeter time. The binaries may also accrete a significant amount of gas from the disk, well above the Eddington rate. This could lead to detectable X-ray or gamma-ray emission, but would require hyper-Eddington accretion with a few percent radiative efficiency, comparable to thin disks. We discuss implications for gravitational-wave observations and black hole population studies. We estimate that Advanced LIGO may detect ∼20 such gas-induced binary mergers per year.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3396b028cf7975dc08f54ae002cf4bfaeba84a78

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

Citations in the corpus

• Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…GW captures of primordial BHs (Bird et al. 2016; Cholis et al. 2016; Sasaki et al. 2016; Carr et al. 2016), active galactic nuclei discs (Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017; McKernan et al. 2017), galactic nuclei (O’Leary et al. 2009; Hong & Lee 2015; VanLandingham et al. 2016;…”
• Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “10 And also above this natal kick the mergers of isolated binaries is significantly suppressed (Belczynski et al. 2016b) Recently, Bartos et al. (2017) showed that with a big enough sample of observed BH-BH mergers, a certain BH-BH merger channel can be statistically correlated with rare galaxy type”
• Merging Binaries in the Galactic Center: The eccentric Kozai-Lidov mechanism with stellar evolution (2016, background): “However, it has been suggested that the presence of such a gaseous disk could lead to efficient merging of binaries, see Bartos et al. (2016).”
• ILLUMINATING BLACK HOLE BINARY FORMATION CHANNELS WITH SPINS IN ADVANCED LIGO (2016, background): “…oscillations from either stellar-mass triples (e.g., Silsbee & Tremaine 2016) or binaries orbiting a super-massive BH (e.g., Antonini & Perets 2012; VanLandingham et al. 2016), or from binaries that form and potentially accrete gas in AGN disks (e.g., Stone et al. 2016; Bartos et al. 2016).”
• Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, methodology): “Studies of burst localization usingBayesWave in the first year of the advanceddetector era, and using cWB and LIB in the first two years have been completed in Bécsy et al. (2016) and Essick et al. (2015), respectively.”
• On the rate of black hole binary mergers in galactic nuclei due to dynamical hardening (2017, background): “Bartos et al. (2017) similarly show that such BHB can merge effectively, aided by significant gas accretion from the disk at well above the Eddington rate.”
• Black hole and neutron star mergers in galactic nuclei (2018, background): “If the SMBH is surrounded by a dense disk as in active galactic nuclei then, if the binary BH merges within the disk, a temporary accretion of matter at high rates can ensue (Bartos et al. 2017), resulting in a possible EM counterpart.”
• Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, background): “…clusters such as globular clusters (e.g., Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Rodriguez et al. 2016a, 2015), galactic nuclei and AGN disks (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017), or young stellar clusters (Ziosi et al. 2014; Chatterjee et al. 2017).”
• One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…are active galactic nuclei (AGNs); BHs are predicted to get caught in resonance traps of AGN disks, potentially proceeding through many hierarchical merger events due to the high escape velocity in the vicinity of the supermassive BH (McKernan et al. 2014; Stone et al. 2017; Bartos et al. 2017).”
• Constraining Stellar-mass Black Hole Mergers in AGN Disks Detectable with LIGO (2017, background): “Together, these effects can result in the rapid increase in the mass of embedded BHs, potentially to observed values (e.g., McKernan et al. 2012, 2014; Bellovary et al. 2016; Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017).”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…channels in the literature(Belczynski et al. 2014; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Inayoshi et al. 2016; Mandel & de Mink 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Bartos et al. 2017; Mapelli et al. 2017; Kruckow et al. 2018) produce event rates that are compatible with those from the previous observing…”
• Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Meanwhile, Bellovary et al. (2016); Bartos et al. (2017); Stone et al. (2017); McKernan et al. (2018) emphasised the important role that an accretion disk in an active galactic nucleus could play in enhancing the rate of binary black hole mergers.”