Gravitational Recoil from Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers

By Frank Herrmann, Ian Hinder, D. Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, R. Matzner. 2007

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The inspiraling and merger of binary black holes will likely involve black holes with not only unequal masses but also arbitrary spins. The gravitational radiation emitted by these binaries will carry angular as well as linear momentum. A net flux of emitted linear momentum implies that the black hole produced by the merger will experience a recoil or kick. Previous studies have focused on the recoil velocity from unequal-mass, nonspinning binaries. We present results from simulations of equal-mass but spinning black hole binaries and show how a significant gravitational recoil can also be obtained in these situations. We consider the case of black holes with opposite spins of magnitude a aligned and antialigned with the orbital angular momentum, with a the dimensionless spin parameter of the individual holes. For the initial setups under consideration, we find a recoil velocity of V = 475a km s-1. Supermassive black hole mergers producing kicks of this magnitude could result in the ejection of the final hole produced by the collision from the core of a dwarf galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/527a1ae0de59507223a7e87b7f952aec474de68f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

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”
Modeling Kicks from the Merger of Generic Black Hole Binaries (2008, methodology): “For ξ and H we have fit available numerical data from Herrmann et al. (2007); Koppitz et al. (2007); Baker et al. (2007).”
Formation of z~6 Quasars from Hierarchical Galaxy Mergers (2006, methodology): “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).”
The stochastic gravitational-wave background from massive black hole binary systems: implications for observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays (2008, background): “It is now well established that the recoil magnitude strongly depends on the spins (both magnitude and relative geometry) of the two black holes (Herrmann et al. 2007); the MBH buildup through merger and accretion typically results in highly spinning MBHs, that on average are affected by kicks with…”
Investigating stellar‐mass black hole kicks (2012, background): “Herrmann et al. 2007 estimated the recoil velocity for two coalescing BHs of equal mass and opposite and equal spin.”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Following on from this, and other unequal-mass simulations by Herrmann et al. (2007b), González et al. (2007b) performed the first systematic parameter study of nonspinning black-hole binary mergers with mass ratios in the range 0.253 ≤ 1/q ≤ 1.”