Accretion during the Merger of Supermassive Black Holes

By Philip Armitage, P. Natarajan. 2002

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the evolution of disk accretion during the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in galactic nuclei. In hierarchical galaxy formation models, the most common binaries are likely to arise from minor galactic mergers and have unequal-mass black holes. Once such a binary becomes embedded in an accretion disk at a separation of a ~ 0.1 pc, the merger proceeds in two distinct phases. During the first phase, the loss of orbital angular momentum to the gaseous disk shrinks the binary on a timescale of ~107 yr. The accretion rate onto the primary black hole is not increased, and can be substantially reduced, during this disk-driven migration. At smaller separations, gravitational radiation becomes the dominant angular momentum loss process, and any gas trapped inside the orbit of the secondary is driven inward by the inspiralling black hole. The implied accretion rate just prior to coalescence exceeds the Eddington limit, so the final merger is likely to occur within a common envelope formed from the disrupted inner disk and to be accompanied by high-velocity (~104 km s-1) outflows.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ba89c33d7645ebf2f79c22a285b92c415eecacf

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The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “The final parameterized spectral model that we investigate is motivated by the idea that the dynamics of SMBHBs are influenced by their environments at sub-parsec separations (Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Sesana et al. 2004; Merritt & Milosavljević 2005).”
Long-Term Evolution of Massive Black Hole Binaries (2002, background): “…of ways: by leading to the renewed formation of stars which subsequently interact with the binary; by inducing torques which extract angular momentum from the binary (Armitage & Natarajan, 2002); through accretion, increasing the masses of one or both of the MBHs and reducing their separation; etc.”
Using Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens (2005, background): “Useful models exploring the signatures that may constitute ‘‘precursors’’ of the merger exist (Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Sillanpää et al. 1988; Lehto & Valtonen 1996); we are hopeful that such models can be extended to the ranges of mass and mass ratio of binaries that are likely to be…”
Supermassive black hole binaries in gaseous and stellar circumnuclear discs: orbital dynamics and gas accretion (2006, background): “In particular, we aim at tracing the expected transition of the two discs into a single, circumbinary disc surrounding the two MBHs. Armitage & Natarajan (2002) have shown that the interaction between the two MBHs and the circumbinary disc can drive the binary to coalescence in ∼ 10 Myrs, for MBH se”
BINARY BLACK HOLE ACCRETION FROM A CIRCUMBINARY DISK: GAS DYNAMICS INSIDE THE CENTRAL CAVITY (2013, background): “It is expected that there is an abundance of dense gas in the nuclei of merged galaxies (Barnes & Hernquist 1992; Springel et al. 2005) and that this gas can form a circumbinary accretion disk (Artymowicz & Lubow 1996; Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Milosavljević & Phinney 2005).”
Probing the theory of gravity with gravitational lensing of gravitational waves and galaxy surveys (2019, methodology): “For the supermassive binary BHs, we can expect to see electromagnetic counterparts over a wide of electromagnetic frequency spectrum (Giacomazzo et al. 2012; Haiman 2018; Palenzuela et al. 2010; Farris et al. 2015; Gold et al. 2014; Armitage & Natarajan 2002).”
Gravitational Waves Probe the Coalescence Rate of Massive Black Hole Binaries (2002, methodology): “Examining these possible perturbations further, Gould & Rix (2000) and Armitage & Natarajan (2002) revisited the earlier idea (Begelman et al. 1980) that gas dynamics—the same physics as planetary migrations—could be responsible for this evolution and indeed for fueling some or all quasar activity.”
Black hole mergers: can gas discs solve the ‘final parsec’ problem? (2009, methodology): “…recently there has been interest in finding an electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave emission expected during the final stages of black hole coalescence (Ivanov et al. 1999; Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Milosavljević & Phinney 2005; Dotti et al. 2006; Loeb2007; Cuadra et al. 2009).”
Early Reionization by Miniquasars (2003, background): “Another possibility is that gas processes, rather than three-body interactions with stars or DM, may induce IMBH binaries to shrink rapidly and coalesce (e.g. Armitage & Natarajan 2002; Gould & Rix 2000).”
Massive black hole binary mergers within subparsec scale gas discs (2008, background): “…likely to be important for SMBH binary mergers, provided that the mass of gas in the disc is roughly of the same order of magnitude as the mass in black holes (Gould & Rix, 2000; Armitage & Natarajan, 2002; Escala et al., 2005; Dotti et al., 2007; MacFadyen & Milosavljević, 2008; Hayasaki, 2008).”
The Kozai Mechanism and the Evolution of Binary Supermassive Black Holes (2002, background): “Another important process that has received relatively less attention is interaction with surrounding gas, which can also extract energy from the binary and drive it to merge (e.g. Armitage & Natarajan 2002 and references therein).”
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).”
The Afterglow of Massive Black Hole Coalescence (2004, background): “To prevent confusion, we defineαgas, related to the usual definition viaαgasPgas = αPtotal, where 2 This is in contrast to theq ≪ 1 case considered by Armitage & Natarajan (2002), who assumed that there was still gas accreting onto the black holes.”