Lidov–Kozai Cycles with Gravitational Radiation: Merging Black Holes in Isolated Triple Systems
By K. Silsbee, S. Tremaine. 2016
227 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We show that a black-hole binary with an external companion can undergo Lidov–Kozai cycles that cause a close pericenter passage, leading to a rapid merger due to gravitational-wave emission. This scenario occurs most often for systems in which the companion has a mass comparable to the reduced mass of the binary and the companion orbit has a semimajor axis within a factor of ∼10 of the binary semimajor axis. Using a simple population-synthesis model and three-body simulations, we estimate the rate of mergers in triple black-hole systems in the field to be about six per Gpc3 per year in the absence of natal kicks during black-hole formation. This value is within the low end of the 90% credible interval for the total black hole–black hole merger rate inferred from the current LIGO results. There are many uncertainties in these calculations, the largest of which is the unknown distribution of natal kicks. Even modest natal kicks of 40 km s−1 will reduce the merger rate by a factor of 40. A few percent of these systems will have eccentricity greater than 0.999 when they first enter the frequency band detectable by aLIGO (above 10 Hz).
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a382a393c56603b393b3464ddd4b5a9d74631724
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, methodology): “This process will expedite the inspiral time of the BBH, allowing systems to merge as GW sources that would not typically merge within a Hubble time (Silsbee & Tremaine 2017; Antonini et al. 2017; Fragione & Kocsis 2019; Vigna-Gómez et al. 2020).”
- Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in Dense Star Clusters: The Role of Binary–Binary Encounters (2018, methodology): “…through the evolution of three-body and four-body hierarchical systems (e.g., Miller & Hamilton 2002; Antonini & Perets 2012; Antonini et al. 2016; Silsbee & Tremaine 2017; Antonini et al. 2017; Rodriguez & Antonini 2018; Hoang et al. 2017; Liu & Lai 2017, 2018a,b; Randall & Xianyu 2018a,b;…”
- Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “This channel may operate in a number of regimes, from isolated stellar triples (Silsbee and Tremaine, 2017) to dynamically formed triples in clusters (Antonini et al., 2016) to triples in which the outer companion is a massive black hole in a galactic center (Antonini and Perets, 2012; Hoang et…”
- Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, background): “…more exotic formation channels have been suggested for facilitating BBH mergers, such as field triples tightened by Lidov–Kozai cycles (Antonini et al. 2017; Silsbee & Tremaine 2017), primordially formed black holes (Bird et al. 2016), or remnants of population III stars (Inayoshi et al. 2016).”
- Black hole and neutron star mergers in galactic nuclei (2018, background): “…homogeneous evolution in short-period stellar binaries (Mandel & de Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016), stellar triples (Antonini et al. 2017; Silsbee & Tremaine 2017), quadruple systems (Fragione & Kocsis 2019; Liu & Lai 2019) and Kozai-Lidov (KL) mergers of binaries in galactic nuclei…”
- ILLUMINATING BLACK HOLE BINARY FORMATION CHANNELS WITH SPINS IN ADVANCED LIGO (2016, background): “…that formed from pre-existing stellar binaries, such as those driven to merger via Kozai-Lidov oscillations from either stellar-mass triples (e.g., Silsbee & Tremaine 2016) or binaries orbiting a super-massive BH (e.g., Antonini & Perets 2012; VanLandingham et al. 2016), or from binaries that…”
- The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “…not born in the same binary (e.g., Sigurdsson & Hernquist 1993; Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000; Miller & Lauburg 2009; Rodriguez et al. 2015; Antonini et al. 2016); or (vi) Lidov–Kozai resonance bringing the inner binary to merge in hierarchical triple systems (e.g., Silsbee & Tremaine 2017).”
- Eccentric Black Hole Gravitational-wave Capture Sources in Galactic Nuclei: Distribution of Binary Parameters (2017, background): “…binary formation and evolution channels typically produce binaries with eccentricities at or below 10−3 when their GW signals enter the aLIGO band (Kowalska et al. 2011; Cholis et al. 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2016a, 2016b; Samsing & Ramirez-Ruiz 2017; Silsbee & Tremaine 2017; Randall & Xianyu 2018a).”
- Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, methodology): “…of massive stars (Belczynski et al. 2002; Belczynski et al. 2016; Marchant et al. 2016; Mandel & De Mink 2016; Gerosa et al. 2018; Spera et al. 2018) or in hierarchical triple systems via the Lidov-Kozai mechanism (Silsbee & Tremaine 2017; Antonini et al. 2017, 2018; Rodriguez & Antonini 2018).”
- Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, methodology): “Silsbee & Tremaine (2016) also consider models with a non-zero natal kick velocity.”