The Afterglow of Massive Black Hole Coalescence

By Milos Milosavljevic, E. Phinney. 2004

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The final merger of a pair of massive black holes in a galactic nucleus is compelled by gravitational radiation. Gravitational waves from the mergers of black holes of masses 105-107(1 + z)-1 M☉ at redshifts of 1-20 will be readily detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, but an electromagnetic afterglow would be helpful in pinpointing the source and its redshift. Long before the merger, the binary "hollows out" any surrounding gas and shrinks slowly compared to the viscous timescale of a circumbinary disk. The inner gas disk is truncated at the radius where gravitational torque from the binary balances the viscous torque, and accretion onto the black holes is diminished. Initially, the inner truncation radius is able to follow the shrinking binary inward. But eventually the gravitational radiation timescale becomes shorter than the viscous timescale in the disk, leading to a merged black hole surrounded by a hollow disk of gas. We show that the subsequent viscous evolution of the hollow, radiation pressure-dominated disk will create an ~1043.5(M/106 M☉) ergs s-1 X-ray source on a timescale ~7(1 + z)(M/106 M☉)1.32 yr. This justifies follow-up monitoring of gravitational wave events with next-generation X-ray observatories. Analysis of the detailed light curve of these afterglows will yield new insights into the subtle physics of accretion onto massive black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61e1ab6c0f4c65cfabf734bd12a6b48d88bc731f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “Possibilities include GRBs resulting from neutron star mergers (Dalal et al., 2006) and the optical, X-ray, or radio signatures of the response of an accretion disk to a massive black hole merger (Milosavljevic and Phinney, 2005; Lippai et al., 2008).”
Supermassive black hole binaries in gaseous and stellar circumnuclear discs: orbital dynamics and gas accretion (2006, background): “This will constrain the properties of an electromagnetic precursor associated to the binary coalescence (Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Kocsis et al. 2005; Milosavljevic & Phinney 2005; Dotti et al. 2006).”
BINARY BLACK HOLE ACCRETION FROM A CIRCUMBINARY DISK: GAS DYNAMICS INSIDE THE CENTRAL CAVITY (2013, background): “Thus, we expect the flow to reach a quasi-steady state in which the size of the inner cavity is determined by the balance between gravitational torques and viscous stresses (Artymowicz & Lubow 1994; Milosavljević & Phinney 2005).”
THE POPULATION OF VISCOSITY- AND GRAVITATIONAL WAVE-DRIVEN SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE BINARIES AMONG LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2009, background): “In particular, Milosavljevic & Phinney (2005) evaluate disk conditions at the single radius at the edge of the gap, at the time of decoupling, and do not discuss the transition from the disk- to the secondary-dominated decay, or other details of the binary’s orbital decay.”
Black hole mergers: can gas discs solve the ‘final parsec’ problem? (2009, methodology): “…(left) and the profile of the local mass flux in the disċM = 2πνΣ in units of the Eddington rate at the innermost stable orbitṀEdd, where we assume mass to energy conversion efficiency ofη = 0.1 (we use this scaling for ease of comparison with the results of Milosavljević & Phinney 2005).”
An Eccentric Circumbinary Accretion Disk and the Detection of Binary Massive Black Holes (2006, methodology): “100rg, the binary decay timescale becomes shorter than the viscous response time of the disk, and the two components decouple (Milosavljević & Phinney 2005).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “rgers of galaxies) or because some years after the merger an X-ray source turns on (accretion will be disrupted by the tidal forces of the orbiting black holes, but will start again after they merge) [257]. Other eﬀects that might lead to an identiﬁcation include evidence that stars have been expell”
A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0? (2008, background): “Accretion activity may have switched off temporarily in the course of the binary SMBH merging, once the orbital decay time due to emission of gravitational waves had become smaller than the viscous timescale of the disk (e.g., Liu et al. 2003, Milosavljević & Phinney 2005).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “In the last decade, several mechanisms producing electromagnetic counterparts to black hole binary coalescences have been proposed (e.g., Armitage and Natarajan, 2002, Milosavljević and Phinney, 2005, Phinney, 2009); an exhaustive review can be found in (Schnittman, 2011).”
Accretion into the central cavity of a circumbinary disc (2012, background): “As a result, the disc decouples from the binary and is ‘left behind’, rendering our initial conditions inconsistent in this regime (e.g. Milosavljević & Phinney 2005; although see Farris et al. 2012b; Noble et al. 2012 whose MHD simulations suggest that the gas can follow the binary down to…”
Using Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens (2005, background): “Milosavljević & Phinney (2005) have recently developed a model for the late X-ray afterglow of a BBH merger.”
Massive black hole binary mergers within subparsec scale gas discs (2008, background): “…fraction of the energy released during the merger may go into heating the gas, producing an electromagnetic precursor (Armitage & Natarajan, 2002) or afterglow (Milosavljević & Phinney, 2005; Lippai et al., 2008; Schnittman & Krolik, 2008; Shields & Bonning, 2008) to the gravitational wave event.”