Cosmological Black Hole Spin Evolution by Mergers and Accretion

By Emanuele Berti, M. Volonteri. 2008

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the spins of the merging holes with the orbital angular momentum is very efficient. We analyze the spin evolution in three specific scenarios: (1) spin evolves only through mergers, (2) spin evolves through mergers and prolonged accretion episodes, and (3) spin evolves through mergers and short-lived (chaotic) accretion episodes. We study how different diagnostics can distinguish between these evolutionary scenarios, assessing the discriminating power of gravitational-wave measurements and X-ray spectroscopy. Gravitational radiation can produce three different types of spin measurements, yielding, respectively, the spins of the two black holes in a binary inspiral prior to merger, the spin of the merger remnant (as encoded in the ring-down waves), and the spin of “single” black holes during the extreme mass-ratio inspiral (EMRI) of compact objects. The latter spin population is also accessible to iron-line measurements. We compute and compare the spin distributions relevant for these different observations. If iron-line measurements and gravitational-wave observations of EMRIs only yield dimensionless spins j = J/M2 > 0.9, then prolonged accretion should be responsible for spin-up, and chaotic accretion scenarios would be very unlikely. If only a fraction of the whole population of low-redshift black holes spins rapidly, spin-alignment during binary mergers (rather than prolonged accretion) could be responsible for spin-ups.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffd8bff1e4d00ae773de6d738bb2abddd9a8ba86

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Citations in the corpus

THE SPIN OF THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE IN NGC 3783 (2011, background): “The spin distribution of the SMBH population (and its dependence on SMBH mass) encodes the black hole growth history (Moderski & Sikora 1996; Volonteri et al. 2005; Berti & Volonteri 2008).”
Grand unification of AGN activity in the ΛCDM cosmology (2009, methodology): “Some of these ideas have recently been explored using simplified models of galaxy formation by Berti & Volonteri (2008) and Lagos et al. (2009).”
Circularization of Tidally Disrupted Stars around Spinning Supermassive Black Holes (2015, background): “The present spin of a SMBH records the history of gas accretion and mergers with other black holes, and statistical samples of SMBH spins encode valuable information on the growth history of SMBHs in the universe (Volonteri et al. 2005; Berti & Volonteri 2008).”
Superradiance (2015, background): “. However, for supermassive BHs we may worry about possible spin growth due to mergers with other BHs and/or accretion. The most likely mechanism to produce fastly-spinning BHs is prolonged accretion [490]. Therefore, a conservative assumption to estimate the astrophysical consequences of the instab”
Suzaku observations of 'bare' active galactic nuclei (2012, background): “Berti & Volonteri (2008) calculated the local spin distributions expected for various different SMBH growth scenarios under the assumption that the SMBH seeds were not rotating.”
THE RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY OF ACCRETION FLOWS IN INDIVIDUAL ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, background): “If it grew through a series of independent events (minor mergers, episodic accretions), then a∗ will be close to zero (Hughes & Blandford 2003; Gammie et al. 2004; Volonteri et al. 2005; King & Pringle 2006; Berti & Volonteri 2008).”
The evolution of primordial black holes and their final observable spins (2020, background): “Several phenomena might affect the spin evolution of PBHs [38].”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, background): “We next have to make important assumptions about the treatment of mergers between DM halos and their resident BHs.”
Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, background): “The most likely mechanism to produce fastly-spinning BHs is prolonged accretion [486].”
The spin of the black hole microquasar XTE J1550−564 via the continuum-fitting and Fe-line methods (2010, background): “Hierarchical models for the growth of supermassive BHs require knowledge of the spin distributions of the merging partners (Volonteri et al. 2005; Berti & Volonteri 2008), and the observed properties of AGNs may be strongly conditioned by BH spin (McNamara et al. 2009; Garofalo, Evans & Sambruna…”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “When mergers occur with retro- and pro-grade orbits equally distributed, as it is expected in the case of astrophysical black holes (Hughes and Blandford, 2003), the average spin of the merger remnant is about 0.7, close to the expectation for non spinning holes (Berti and Volonteri, 2008).”
Simulations of magnetized discs around black holes: Effects of black hole spin, disc thickness and magnetic field geometry (2010, background): “These factors also affect the BH spin history (Gammie, Shapiro & McKinney 2004), and so must be taken into account when considering the effect of accretion on the cosmological evolution of BH spin (Hughes & Blandford 2003; Gammie et al. 2004; Berti & Volonteri 2008).”