EFFICIENT MERGER OF BINARY SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES IN MERGING GALAXIES

By Fazeel Khan, Andreas Just, D. Merritt. 2011

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In spherical galaxies, binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have difficulty reaching sub-parsec separations due to depletion of stars on orbits that intersect the massive binary—the “final parsec problem.” Galaxies that form via major mergers are substantially non-spherical, and it has been argued that the centrophilic orbits in triaxial galaxies might provide stars to the massive binary at a high enough rate to avoid stalling. Here we test that idea by carrying out fully self-consistent merger simulations of galaxies containing central SMBHs. We find hardening rates of the massive binaries that are indeed much higher than in spherical models and essentially independent of the number of particles used in the simulations. Binary eccentricities remain high throughout the simulations. Our results constitute a fully stellar-dynamical solution to the final parsec problem and imply a potentially high rate of events for low-frequency gravitational wave detectors like LISA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c8d2ab58a97c16e10e1af4efec0912e67911dd1

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. E. Barausse
2. M. Volonteri
3. Zoltán Haiman
4. A. Sesana
5. L. Hernquist
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7. J. Hawley
8. P. Hopkins

Citations in the corpus

• THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS OF CIRCUMBINARY ACCRETION DISKS: DISK STRUCTURES AND ANGULAR MOMENTUM TRANSPORT (2011, background): “Although they are potential solutions to this problem, they require either special non-axisymmetric stellar distributions (Berczik et al. 2006; Khan et al. 2011; Preto et al. 2011) or extra perturbers such as giant molecular clouds (Perets & Alexander 2008).”
• 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.”
• Evolution of binary black holes in self gravitating discs. Dissecting the torques (2012, background): “…shown to be effective in extracting the binary energy and angular momentum (see, e.g., Escala et al. 2005; Dotti et al. 2007; Cuadra et al. 2009; Khan et al. 2011; Preto et al. 2011), likely driving the system to final coalescence (an extensive discussion on the fate of sub-parsec BHBs can be…”
• Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “Self-consistent high resolution direct N-body simulations (Berczik et al., 2006, Khan et al., 2011, Preto et al., 2011) indicate that the stellar potential of the remnant galaxy retains, in response to the anisotropy of the merger, a sufficiently high degree of rotation and triaxiality to guarantee…”
• Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments (2016, background): “While there is some evidence that for galaxy-merger remnants the hardening rate can be nearly that of a ‘full’ LC (e.g. Khan et al. 2011), the community seems to be far from a consensus (e.g. Vasiliev et al. 2014), and a purely numerical solution to the LC problem is currently still unfeasible.”