MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS

By F. Antonini, F. Rasio. 2016

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by the recent detection of gravitational waves from the black hole binary merger GW150914, we study the dynamical evolution of (stellar-mass) black holes in galactic nuclei, where massive star clusters reside. With masses of and sizes of only a few parsecs, nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are the densest stellar systems observed in the local universe and represent a robust environment where black hole binaries can dynamically form, harden, and merge. We show that due to their large escape speeds, NSCs can retain a large fraction of their merger remnants. Successive mergers can then lead to significant growth and produce black hole mergers of several tens of solar masses similar to GW150914 and up to a few hundreds of solar masses, without the need to invoke extremely low metallicity environments. We use a semi-analytical approach to describe the dynamics of black holes in massive star clusters. Our models give a black hole binary merger rate of from NSCs, implying up to a few tens of possible detections per year with Advanced LIGO. Moreover, we find a local merger rate of for high mass black hole binaries similar to GW150914; a merger rate comparable to or higher than that of similar binaries assembled dynamically in globular clusters (GCs). Finally, we show that if all black holes receive high natal kicks, , then NSCs will dominate the local merger rate of binary black holes compared to either GCs or isolated binary evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/349fa56d261272077e61a9adff71dc4ee092ea58

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

Citations in the corpus

• Eccentric Black Hole Gravitational-wave Capture Sources in Galactic Nuclei: Distribution of Binary Parameters (2017, background): “…4 http://www.ego-gw.it/ 5 http://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ 6 http://www.gw-indigo.org/ stellar systems, which can drive the low-eccentricity inner binary to high eccentricity (Gültekin et al. 2006; O’Leary et al. 2006; Kushnir et al. 2013; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2017).”
• Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, background): “…et al. 2010, 2016; Mandel & de Mink 2016); (ii) dynamical interactions in galactic nuclei, with and without a massive BH (Antonini & Perets 2012; Antonini & Rasio 2016); (iii) dynamical exchange interactions in the dense stellar core of globular clusters (Rodriguez et al. 2015; Haster et al.…”
• Nuclear star clusters (2009, background): “These models are able to produce some of the properties of both the present-day NSCs and the ‘left over’ GC systems (Antonini 2013; Gnedin et al. 2014). Antonini et al. (2012) and Antonini (2013) find a size-luminosity (or mass) relation of reff ∝ M NSC for a small number of mergers, similar to the ”
• Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, unknown): “…2008; O’Leary et al. 2009; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Mapelli et al. 2013; Mapelli & Zampieri 2014; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Mapelli 2016; Kimpson et al. 2016; Hurley et al. 2016; O’Leary et al. 2016; Askar et al. 2017, 2018; Zevin et al. 2017;…”
• Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters and their role in gravitational-wave generation (2016, methodology): “Also, such a semi-analytic modelling, in the context of ∼ 107M nuclear stellar clusters and with focus on stellarmass BBH inspirals produced by them, has been recently performed by Antonini & Rasio (2016).”
• Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, methodology): “It follows that the binary is ejected from the cluster when its semi-major axis drops below (Antonini & Rasio 2016): aej = 0.2G m1m2 m123 q3/v2esc.”
• Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? (2017, background): “The hierarchical merger scenario has been proposed in the context of dynamical formation in nuclear star clusters (Antonini & Rasio 2016), young stellar clusters (Mapelli 2016), AGN disks (McKernan et al. 2017), as well as in the formation of primordial BHs (Clesse & García-Bellido 2017).”
• Most Black Holes Are Born Very Slowly Rotating (2019, background): “However, a caveat is the population of rapidly rotating (a ∼ 0.7) BH primaries expected for second generation cluster mergers (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Fishbach et al. 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Rodriguez et al. 2018).”
• Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…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; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Hoang et al. 2017), and very massive stellar mergers (Loeb 2016; Woosley 2016; Janiuk et al. 2017; D’Orazio & Loeb 2017).”
• One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…at large values by the limitations of massive-star evolution, though the retention rate and frequency of hierarchical mergers is sensitive to the mass and escape velocities of the cluster in question (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Antonini et al. 2018; Gerosa & Berti 2019; Kimball et al. 2020a,b).”
• Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, background): “Finally, we note that Antonini & Rasio (2016) derived a merger rate in nuclear star clusters without central massive black holes of ∼ 1 Gpc−3yr−1, where the BH binaries form dynamically as in GCs.”
• Constraining Stellar-mass Black Hole Mergers in AGN Disks Detectable with LIGO (2017, background): “…and in globular clusters (Breen & Heggie 2013; Rodriguez et al. 2016a, 2018; Wang et al. 2016), they are more likely to form in regions with concentrations of BHs, such as galactic nuclear star clusters (Hopman & Alexander 2006; O’Leary et al. 2009; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2016b).”
• 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).”
• MOCCA-SURVEY Database - I. Coalescing binary black holes originating from globular clusters (2016, background): “Such systems may form in the field via binary stellar evolution or they could have a dynamical origin in dense stellar environments like GCs or galactic nuclei (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Antonini & Perets 2012).”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “Many potential formation 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…”