Rapid Eccentricity Oscillations and the Mergers of Compact Objects in Hierarchical Triples
By Joseph M. Antognini, B. Shappee, T. Thompson, P. Amaro-Seoane. 2013
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Kozai-Lidov (KL) oscillations can accelerate compact object mergers via gravitational wave (GW) radiation by driving the inner binaries of hierarchical triples to high eccentricities. We perform direct three-body integrations of high mass ratio compact object triple systems using Fewbody including post-Newtonian terms. We find that the inner binary undergoes rapid eccentricity oscillations (REOs) on the timescale of the outer orbital period which drive it to higher eccentricities than secular theory would otherwise predict, resulting in substantially reduced merger times. For a uniform distribution of tertiary eccentricity ($e_2$), ~40% of systems merge within ~1-2 eccentric KL timescales whereas secular theory predicts that only ~20% of such systems merge that rapidly. This discrepancy becomes especially pronounced at low $e_2$, with secular theory overpredicting the merger time by many orders of magnitude. We show that a non-negligible fraction of systems have eccentricity > 0.8 when they merge, in contrast to predictions from secular theory. Our results are applicable to high mass ratio triple systems containing black holes or neutron stars. In objects in which tidal effects are important, such as white dwarfs, stars, and planets, REOs can reduce the tidal circularization timescale by an order of magnitude and bring the components of the inner binary into closer orbits than would be possible in the secular approximation.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4afbe87329577b72890c23ae03aea623eb0dcb10
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- BLACK HOLE MERGERS AND BLUE STRAGGLERS FROM HIERARCHICAL TRIPLES FORMED IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2015, background): “…the angular momentum perturbation due to the tertiary can become comparable to or shorter than the dynamical timescales of the system rendering the secular approach no longer valid (Antonini & Perets 2012; Katz & Dong 2012; Seto 2013; Antonini et al. 2014; Antognini et al. 2014; Bode & Wegg 2014).”
- The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “ M, m 3 = 107 M, a 1 = 1 pc, a 2 = 20 pc, e 1 = 0:1, e 2 = 0:2, itot = 80. Left panel was initialized with ! 1 = ! 2 = 0and the right panel was initialized with ! 1 ! 2 = 90. Figure adopted from Antognini et al. (2014). similarly to the condition in Equation (50). Another consequence of large eccent”
- Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, result): “…the merger rates are high when ǫz ∼ 1 because the angular momentum changes in dynamical timescales generally lead to extremely large values of the eccentricities, as previously noted by several authors (e.g., Antonini & Perets 2012; Katz & Dong 2012; Antognini et al. 2014; Antonini et al. 2014).”
- Timescales of Kozai-Lidov oscillations at quadrupole and octupole order in the test particle limit (2015, background): “…limit non-secular effects become important, so the above analysis does not apply (e.g., Katz & Dong 2012; Seto 2013; Antonini et al. 2014; Bode & Wegg 2014; Antognini et al. 2014). c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 oct and there is excellent agreement between the secular and analytic calculations.”
- Lidov–Kozai Cycles with Gravitational Radiation: Merging Black Holes in Isolated Triple Systems (2016, background): “It is worth noting that it has been found (Seto 2013; Antognini et al. 2014; Antonini et al. 2014) that mergers where the inner binary has high eccentricity when radiating at frequencies above 10 Hz are only found when the orbits are simulated with an N-body code, rather than an octupole secular…”
- One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…and binaries are allowed to interact through strong three- and four-body encounters, whose outcomes are directly integrated with Fewbody (Fregeau & Rasio 2007), a small N dynamical integrator with relativistic corrections (Antognini et al. 2014; Amaro-Seoane & Chen 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2018b).”
- Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, background): “…binaries will in fact have higher eccentricities as they enter the aLIGO band and a higher chance of merging than what we would predict based on the standard secular equations of motion (Antonini & Perets 2012; Katz & Dong 2012; Antonini et al. 2014; Antognini et al. 2014; Antonini et al. 2016).”
- Rapid and Bright Stellar-mass Binary Black Hole Mergers in Active Galactic Nuclei (2016, background): “…in dense stellar systems including globular clusters and galactic nuclei (Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2002; Miller & Hamilton 2002; Portegies Zwart et al. 2004; O’Leary et al. 2009; Kocsis & Levin 2012; Naoz et al. 2013; Antonini et al. 2014; Antognini et al. 2014; Morscher et al. 2015).”
- Black hole and neutron star mergers in galactic nuclei (2018, methodology): “Compared to secular evolution, our approach allows us to correctly follow the large eccentricity values attained by CO binaries via KL cycles (Antognini et al. 2014).”