Assisted inspirals of stellar mass black holes embedded in AGN discs: solving the ‘final au problem’
By Nicholas C. Stone, B. Metzger, Zoltán Haiman. 2016
374 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We explore the evolution of stellar mass black hole binaries (BHBs) which are formed in the self-gravitating disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Hardening due to three-body scattering and gaseous drag are effective mechanisms that reduce the semi-major axis of a BHB to radii where gravitational waves take over, on timescales shorter than the typical lifetime of the AGN disk. Taking observationally-motivated assumptions for the rate of star formation in AGN disks, we find a rate of disk-induced BHB mergers ($\mathcal{R} \sim 3~{\rm yr}^{-1}~{\rm Gpc}^{-3}$, but with large uncertainties) that is comparable with existing estimates of the field rate of BHB mergers, and the approximate BHB merger rate implied by the recent Advanced LIGO detection of GW150914. BHBs formed thorough this channel will frequently be associated with luminous AGN, which are relatively rare within the sky error regions of future gravitational wave detector arrays. This channel could also possess a (potentially transient) electromagnetic counterpart due to super-Eddington accretion onto the stellar mass black hole following the merger.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd7ec2bc2c78460e7c1058a37b1c9200facecf8c
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, background): “…clusters such as globular clusters (e.g., Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Rodriguez et al. 2016a, 2015), galactic nuclei and AGN disks (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017), or young stellar clusters (Ziosi et al. 2014; Chatterjee et al. 2017).”
- Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, result): “The GWs emitted by the rate of stellar-mass BH mergers required to produce the IMBH could naturally account for the heavy stellar-mass BHs observed by LIGO (e.g., Stone et al. 2017; McKernan et al. 2017) and is also consistent with the inferred 9-240 Gpc−3 yr−1 rate from LIGO (Abbott et al. 2016a).”
- Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…of primordial BHs (Bird et al. 2016; Cholis et al. 2016; Sasaki et al. 2016; Carr et al. 2016), active galactic nuclei 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;…”