Getting a Kick Out of Numerical Relativity

By John G. Baker, J. Centrella, Dae-Il Choi, M. Koppitz, J. V. Meter, M. C. Miller. 2006

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Recent developments in numerical relativity have made it possible to reliably follow the coalescence of two black holes from near the innermost stable circular orbit to final ringdown. This opens up a wide variety of exciting astrophysical applications of these simulations. Chief among these is the net kick received when two unequal mass or spinning black holes merge. The magnitude of this kick has bearing on the production and growth of supermassive black holes during the epoch of structure formation, and on the retention of black holes in stellar clusters. Here we report the first accurate numerical calculation of this kick, for two nonspinning black holes in a 1.5 : 1 mass ratio, which is expected on the basis of analytic considerations to give a significant fraction of the maximum possible recoil. We have performed multiple runs with different initial separations, orbital angular momenta, resolutions, extraction radii, and gauges. The full range of our kick speeds is 86-116 km s-1, and the most reliable runs give kicks between 86 and 97 km s-1. This is intermediate between the estimates from two recent post-Newtonian analyses and suggests that at redshifts z ≳ 10, halos with masses ≲109 M☉ will have difficulty retaining coalesced black holes after major mergers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a047c66b29d49da1cca1577a7be599fdc08b6e1

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Citations in the corpus

Ejection of Supermassive Black Holes from Galaxy Cores (2007, background): “200kms−1 in the absence of spins (Baker et al. 2006b; González et al. 2007b; Herrmann et al. 2007).”
Gravitational Recoil from Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers (2007, methodology): “In particular, we have carried out extensive tests (D. Shoemaker et al. 2007, in preparation) for the R1 run from Baker et al. (2006b) and found resolution ranges that yield between third- and fourth-order convergence.”
Mass Deficits, Stalling Radii, and the Merger Histories of Elliptical Galaxies (2006, background): “(4) The gravitational wave rocket effect is believed to be capable of delivering kicks to a coalescing binary as large as 250 km s 1 (Favata et al. 2004; Blanchet et al. 2005; Herrmann et al. 2006; Baker et al. 2006).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “Some are studying the effect of the spin orientations of the component black holes on the linear momentum carried away by the final black hole, fancifully called kicks [188, 92, 62, 105, 180, 294]; some have focused on the dependence of the emitted waveform phase and energy on the mass ratio; and ye”
Alignment of the Spins of Supermassive Black Holes Prior to Coalescence (2007, methodology): “Kick speeds have been reported for non-spinning black holes with different mass ratios (Herrmann, Shoemaker, & Laguna 2006; Baker et al. 2006; Gonzalez et al. 2006) and for binaries with spin axes parallel or antiparallel to the orbital axes (Herrmann et al. 2007; Koppitz et al. 2007; Baker et al.…”
Formation of z~6 Quasars from Hierarchical Galaxy Mergers (2006, background): “However, the halo escape velocities in our simulations are in the range of 486Y1284 km s 1, much larger than the kick velocity 100Y475 km s 1 (e.g., Herrmann et al. 2006; Baker et al. 2006; Gonzalez et al. 2007b; Herrmann et al. 2007, see xx 2.5.5 and 3.4 for more details).”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “2006 was a year of many firsts: the first simulations of unequal-mass black holes and the accompanying recoil of the remnant hole (Baker et al., 2006c), the first mergers of spinning black holes (Campanelli et al., 2006d), the first long waveforms (∼ 7 orbits) (Baker et al., 2007c), the first…”
A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0? (2008, background): “…black holes can attain kicks with velocities of up to a few hundred km s−1 (e.g., Fitchett & Detweiler 1984, Favata et al. 2004, Blanchet et al. 2005, Damour & Gopakumar 2006), recently confirmed by numerical simulations (e.g., Baker et al. 2006, Herrmann et al. 2007a, González et al. 2007a).”
Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips from Generic Black Hole Binaries (2007, methodology): “…Baker et al. 2006b), the effects of elliptical motion (Pretorius 2006) on the gravitational radiation, and waveforms generated from binaries with large initial separations were successfully matched to post-Newtonian theory with very good agreement (Buonanno et al. 2006; Baker et al. 2006c,d).”