ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERPARTS TO BLACK HOLE MERGERS DETECTED BY LIGO

By Abraham Loeb. 2016

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mergers of stellar-mass black holes (BHs), such as GW150914 observed by Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), are not expected to have electromagnetic counterparts. However, the Fermi GBM detector identified a γ-ray transient 0.4 s after the gravitational wave (GW) signal GW150914 with consistent sky localization. I show that the two signals might be related if the BH binary detected by LIGO originated from two clumps in a dumbbell configuration that formed when the core of a rapidly rotating massive star collapsed. In that case, the BH binary merger was followed by a γ-ray burst (GRB) from a jet that originated in the accretion flow around the remnant BH. A future detection of a GRB afterglow could be used to determine the redshift and precise localization of the source. A population of standard GW sirens with GRB redshifts would provide a new approach for precise measurements of cosmological distances as a function of redshift.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af93a0ce81d942ea282babf4b6a72902b1693518

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Citations in the corpus

The effect of pair-instability mass loss on black-hole mergers (2016, background): “…primordial BH-BH formation (Sasaki et al. 2016; Eroshenko 2016), formation of a BH-BH merger from a divided core of a massive rapidly rotating single star (Loeb 2016), or formation of BH-BH mergers with disks around BHs formed from fallback material in weak supernova explosions (Perna et al. 2016).”
FERMI GBM OBSERVATIONS OF LIGO GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE EVENT GW150914 (2016, background): “…(Zhang 2016), unusual environments for the black hole merger that may lead to sufficient surrounding material to fuel the production of the GRB (Loeb 2016; Perna et al. 2016), implications of our observation if the association between GW150914 and GW150914-GBM is real (Ellis et al. 2016; Li et…”
Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…discs (Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017; McKernan et al. 2017), galactic nuclei (O’Leary et al. 2009; Hong & Lee 2015; VanLandingham et al. 2016; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Hoang et al. 2017), and very massive stellar mergers (Loeb 2016; Woosley 2016; Janiuk et al. 2017; D’Orazio & Loeb 2017).”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “If an afterglow were to be detected (Loeb, 2016), additional properties such as redshift could open novel tests of cosmology.”
The spin of the second-born black hole in coalescing binary black holes (2018, background): “Finally, motivated by the existence of a potential electromagnetic counterpart for GW150914 in gamma-rays (Connaughton et al. 2016), a formation channel from a single star, via the fragmentation of their rapidly rotating cores, has been suggested (Loeb 2016; D’Orazio & Loeb 2017).”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “…stars (Kinugawa et al. 2014, 2016; Hartwig et al. 2016; Inayoshi et al. 2016; Dvorkin et al. 2016), cores of massive stars (Reisswig et al. 2013; Loeb 2016; Woosley 2016), or dark matter halos comprised of primordial black holes (Bird et al. 2016; 1 http://www.ligo.org/ 2…”
Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, background): “Models have been proposed to tentatively explain electromagnetic emission from BBHs, but there is no clear favorite as yet (Loeb 2016; Woosley 2016; Perna et al. 2016; Janiuk et al. 2017; Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017; Li et al. 2016; Yamazaki et al. 2016; Ryan and MacFadyen 2017; Murase et…”