Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips from Generic Black Hole Binaries

By M. Campanelli, C. Lousto, Yosef Zlochower, D. Merritt. 2007

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We report the first results from the evolution of generic black hole binaries, i.e., binaries containing unequal-mass black holes with misaligned spins. Our configuration, which has a mass ratio of 2 : 1, consists of an initially nonspinning hole orbiting a larger, rapidly spinning hole (specific spin a/m = 0.885), with the spin direction oriented -45° with respect to the orbital plane. We track the inspiral and merger for ~2 orbits and find that the remnant receives a substantial kick of 454 km s-1, more than twice as large as the maximum kick from nonspinning binaries. The remnant spin direction is flipped by 103° with respect to the initial spin direction of the larger hole. We performed a second run with antialigned spins, a/m = ±0.5 lying in the orbital plane that produces a kick of ~1830 km s-1 off the orbital plane. This value scales to nearly 4000 km s-1 for maximally spinning holes. Such a large recoil velocity opens up the possibility that a merged binary can be ejected even from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/865fc8e43d1daffe595bd9e13b5959a02e8d64f3

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Citations in the corpus

Can Supermassive Black Holes Form in Metal-enriched High-Redshift Protogalaxies? (2008, background): “The typical recoil speed is expected to be vrecoilk 100 km s 1 (and may be as large as 4000 km s 1 for special BH spin configurations; see, e.g., Campanelli et al. 2007 and references therein), significantly exceeding the escape velocity (P10 km s 1) from typical dark matter (DM) halos that exist…”
Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, background): “But, if the BHs have a finite spin, the kick could be much larger (Damour & Gopakumar 2006; González et al. 2007b; Campanelli et al. 2007).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “ual mass black holes, each with its spin angular momentum equal to 0.76, the total energy radiated in the aligned (anti-aligned) case is 6.7% (2.2%) and the spin of the ﬁnal black hole is 0.89 (0.44) [105, 294]. Heuristically, in the aligned case the black holes experience a repulsive force, deferri”
The Masses of Nuclear Black Holes in Luminous Elliptical Galaxies and Implications for the Space Density of the Most Massive Black Holes (2006, background): “By contrast, the saturation of BHmass in the largest galaxies that is predicted by the M.- relation requires that one of the two merging BHs be ejected from the galaxy as a common occurrence, which may not be natural (however, see Campanelli et al. 2007).”
The evolution of massive black hole seeds (2007, background): “For merging MBHs with high spin, in particular orbital configurations, the recoil velocity can be as high as a few thousands of kilometers per second (Campanelli et al. 2007a,b; González et al. 2007; Herrmann et al. 2007; Schnittman 2007).”
Alignment of the Spins of Supermassive Black Holes Prior to Coalescence (2007, background): “…shown that when the spin axes are oppositely directed and in the orbital plane, and the spin magnitudes are high (dimensionless angular momentum â ≡ cJ/GM2 ∼ 1), the net kick speed can perhaps be as large as ∼ 4000 km s−1 (Gonzalez et al. 2007; Schnittman & Buonanno 2007; Campanelli et al. 2007b).”
The Einstein Toolkit: a community computational infrastructure for relativistic astrophysics (2011, methodology): “, [11–18] and references therein), post-Newtonian and numerical waveform comparisons and waveform template generation (e.”
Gravitational Recoil from Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers (2007, result): “D, 72, No. 024021 5 Soon after the completion of our work, results that support our findings of spin effects on kicks were obtained by Campanelli et al. (2007) and Koppitz et al. (2007).”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Meanwhile, to leading PN orders, the spins should contribute through components of ~∆ ≡ ~S2/M2− ~S1/M1 and ~S ≡ ~S1 + ~S2 (Campanelli et al., 2007b; Kidder, 1995; Racine et al., 2009).”
Formation of z~6 Quasars from Hierarchical Galaxy Mergers (2006, background): “This gives a maximum kick of 475 km s 1 for maximal spin, although it is also reported that the recoil velocity can be as large as thousands of kilometers per second (Gonzalez et al. 2007a; Campanelli et al. 2007) for BH binaries in the orbital planewith opposite-directed spin.”
A LARGE SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR CLOSE SUPERMASSIVE BINARY AND RAPIDLY RECOILING BLACK HOLES (2011, positive): “One can argue against a recoiling BH interpretation in some particular cases on theoretical grounds, since recoil speeds far in excess of 100 km s−1 are extremely unlikely (e.g., Dotti et al. 2010) and speeds above 4,000 km s−1 are unattainable (e.g., Campanelli et al. 2007a,b).”