Alignment of the Spins of Supermassive Black Holes Prior to Coalescence
By T. Bogdanović, C. Reynolds, M. C. Miller. 2007
173 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent numerical relativistic simulations of black hole coalescence suggest that in certain alignments the emission of gravitational radiation can produce a kick of several thousand kilometers per second. This exceeds galactic escape speeds; hence, unless there is a mechanism to prevent this, one would expect many galaxies that had merged to be without a central black hole. Here we show that in most galactic mergers, torques from accreting gas suffice to align the orbit and spins of both black holes with the large-scale gas flow. Such a configuration has a maximum kick speed <200 km s-1, safely below galactic escape speeds. We predict, however, that in mergers of galaxies without much gas, the remnant will be kicked out several percent of the time. We also discuss other predictions of our scenario, including implications for jet alignment angles and X-type radio sources.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/351949fd3853ec6a9c1b516959ea7c893205ad58
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments (2016, background): “This is motivated by studies which have shown that gravitational torques from circumbinary disks, such as those we consider, can be effective at aligning spins on timescales significantly shorter than a viscous time (e.g. Bogdanović et al. 2007; Dotti et al. 2010; Miller & Krolik 2013).”
- A LARGE SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR CLOSE SUPERMASSIVE BINARY AND RAPIDLY RECOILING BLACK HOLES (2011, unknown): “…phase of a recoiling BH and since the expected distribution of recoil speeds is heavily weighted towards low speeds (|v| ≪ 1, 000 km s−1) we expect that only a very small fraction of the the quasars we select will be candidate recoiling BHs (see Bogdanović et al. 2007; Dotti et al. 2009a, 2010).”
- Evolution of binary black holes in self gravitating discs. Dissecting the torques (2012, background): “…‘coherence’ of the accretion flow, and has important consequences for the individual BH spin evolution and the magnitude of gravitational recoil at the coalescence (Bogdanović et al. 2007; Dotti et al. 2010; Kesden et al. 2010; Volonteri et al. 2010; Lousto & Zlochower 2011; Lousto et al. 2012).”
- MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS (2016, background): “We note that if there is significant coherent gas accretion, the spins might align in a way that might lead to low recoil kicks (e.g., Bogdanović et al. 2007).”