Evolution of massive binary black holes

By Qingjuan Yu. 2001

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since many or most galaxies have central massive black holes (BHs), mergers of galaxies can form massive binary black holes (BBHs). The evolution of BBHs depends on BH mass ratio and host galaxy type. BBHs with very low mass ratios (say, 0.001) are hardly ever formed by mergers of galaxies because the dynamical friction timescale is too long for the smaller BH to sink into the galactic centre within a Hubble time. BBHs with moderate mass ratios are most likely to form and survive in spherical or nearly spherical galaxies and in high-luminosity or high-dispersion galaxies; they are most likely to have merged in low-dispersion galaxies (line-of-sight velocity dispersion 90 km s−1) or in highly flattened or triaxial galaxies. The semimajor axes of surviving BBHs are generally in the range 10−3–10 pc. The upper limit of this range is close to the HST resolution for the typical nearby galaxies (i.e., galaxies of the Virgo cluster). The absence of double nuclei in the centres of nearby galaxies does not necessarily mean that they have no BBHs. If all galaxies are highly triaxial, there will be no surviving BBHs. Possible observational characteristics of surviving BBHs are also discussed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change

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Citations in the corpus

Massive black hole binary mergers within subparsec scale gas discs (2008, background): “Replenishment of stars on these loss cone orbits occurs on the relaxation time, which typically exceeds the Hubble time (Begelman et al., 1980; Yu, 2002; Merritt, 2006).”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “For example, Yu (2002) finds that in triaxial potentials scattering of stars can efficiently refill the loss cone while Gould and Rix (2000) suggest that the presence of a gaseous disk surrounding the black holes can help harden the binary.”
Efficient Merger of Binary Supermassive Black Holes in Nonaxisymmetric Galaxies (2006, background): “AsN increases, the hardening rate falls, as expected if the binary’s loss cone is repopulated by star-star gravitation l encounters (Yu 2002; Milosavljevic & Merritt 2003).”
Galaxy merging, the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies and the MBH-σ0 relation (2003, background): “…friction on the background stars and then by emission of gravitational waves) is shorter than the characteristic time between two galaxy merging (for a detailed discussion of this problem see, e.g., Milosavljevic & Merritt 2001, Yu 2002, Haehnelt & Kauffmann 2002, Volonteri, Haardt & Madau 2003).”
Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, background): “from a recent galaxy merger) [54–58] or galaxy rotation [59] could enhance the effect of three-body interactions, thus causing the binary to merge in a few Gyr.”
Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research (2004, background): “From a dynamical prespective, the evolution of a SBH binary is very uncertain (Ebisuzaki, Makino & Okumura 1991; Milosavljevic & Merritt 2002; Yu 2002), but current state-of-the-art simulations (Milosavljevic & Merritt 2002) predict the first stages of the evolution, leading to the formation of a…”
Massive Black Hole Binary Evolution (2004, background): “Binary coalescence has a large influence on the spins of SBHs, even for mass ratios as extreme as 10 : 1, and evidence of spin-flips may have been observed.”
Observational constraints on growth of massive black holes (2002, background): “…and equations (43) and (44), we have finally: 2 We assume that any QSO is due to accretion onto a single massive BH, rather than accretion onto two or more BHs in the galactic nucleus, although binary BHs are likely to be present in some galactic centers (Begelman, Blandford & Rees 1980; Yu 2002).”
Long-Term Evolution of Massive Black Hole Binaries (2002, methodology): “Present-day MBH binary separations calculated assuming steady-state galaxies (Yu, 2002) should therefore be interpreted as upper limits.”
The evolution of massive black holes and their spins in their galactic hosts (2012, background): “…Natarajan 2002); or the supply of star available for slingshot interaction may be replenished by star- tar encounters (Milosavljević & Merritt 2003; Yu 2002), or as aresult of the triaxial gravitational potential that one naturlly expects in galaxies forming from major mergers (Merritt & Poon…”
Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter (2016, background): “When two galaxies with CDM halos merge, dynamical friction from the halo drains orbital energy from the black holes and they spiral in to the central few parsecs of the merger remnant [61, 62].”
Mass Deficits, Stalling Radii, and the Merger Histories of Elliptical Galaxies (2006, methodology): “…that it eliminates the need for many of the qualitative distinctions that have been made in the past between the different regimes of binary evolution, e.g., ‘‘soft binaries’’ versus ‘‘hard binaries,’’ hardening via ‘‘dynamical friction’’ versus hardening via ‘‘loss cone draining,’’ etc. (Yu 2002).”
The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “…more realistic model of tidal stripping, the resultant timescale can often be shorter than 1Gyr (Dosopoulou and Antonini 2017; Kelley et al. 2017a; Yu 2002).5 By extracting energy from theSMBHson the kiloparsec separation scale, dynamical friction is a critical initial step toward binary…”
The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “xy. Numerical studies of spheroidal gas-poor galaxies suggest that these binaries can reach about a parsec separation and may stall there (e.g., Begelman et al. 1980; Milosavljevic and Merritt 2001; Yu 2002). The eect of gravitational perturbations of supermassive black hole binaries on an ambient s”