The spin-flip phenomenon in supermassive black hole binary mergers
László Á. Gergely, Peter L. Biermann
备注：
v3: 36 pages, 1 figure; discussion on the validity of the model and estimates for the angular value of the spin-flip added to Section 5; v4: minor changes, 2 new references, published version
Massive merging black holes will be the primary sources of powerful gravitational waves at low frequency, and will permit to test general relativity with candidate galaxies close to a binary black hole merger. In this paper we identify the typical mass ratio of the two black holes but then show that the distance when gravitational radiation becomes the dominant dissipative effect (over dynamical friction) does not depend on the mass ratio. However the dynamical evolution in the gravitational wave emission regime does. For the typical range of mass ratios the final stage of the merger is preceded by a rapid precession and a subsequent spin-flip of the main black hole. This already occurs in the inspiral phase, therefore can be described analytically by post-Newtonian techniques. We then identify the radio galaxies with a super-disk as those in which the rapidly precessing jet produces effectively a powerful wind, entraining the environmental gas to produce the appearance of a thick disk. These specific galaxies are thus candidates for a merger of two black holes to happen in the astronomically near future.
Binary supermassive black holes form naturally in galaxy mergers, but their long-term evolution is uncertain. In spherical galaxies, N-body simulations show that binary evolution stalls at separations much too large for significant emission of gravitational waves (the "final parsec problem"). Here, we follow the long-term evolution of a massive binary in more realistic, triaxial and rotating galaxy models. We find that the binary does not stall. The binary hardening rates that we observe are sufficient to allow complete coalescence of binary SBHs in 10 Gyr or less, even in the absence of colli…
Recent observations and stellar dynamics simulations suggest that thousand solar mass black holes can form in compact massive young star clusters. Any such clusters in the bulge of their host galaxy will spiral to the center within a few hundred million years, where their intermediate-mass black holes are likely to merge eventually with the galaxy's supermassive black hole. If such mergers are common, then future space-based gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna will detect them with such a high signal to noise ratio that towards the end of the inspiral th…
We use the `moving puncture' approach to perform fully non-linear evolutions of spinning quasi-circular black-hole binaries with individual spins not aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We evolve configurations with the individual spins (parallel and equal in magnitude) pointing in the orbital plane and 45-degrees above the orbital plane. We introduce a technique to measure the spin direction and track the precession of the spin during the merger, as well as measure the spin flip in the remnant horizon. The former configuration completes 1.75 orbits before merging, with the spin precess…
The merger of two supermassive black holes is expected to produce a gravitational-wave signal detectable by the satellite LISA. The rate of supermassive-black-hole mergers is intimately connected to the halo merger rate, and the extended Press-Schechter formalism is often employed when calculating the rate at which these events will be observed by LISA. This merger theory is flawed and provides two rates for the merging of the same pair of haloes. We show that the two predictions for the LISA supermassive-black-hole-merger event rate from extended Press-Schechter merger theory are nearly equal…
Understanding the fate of merging supermassive black holes in galactic mergers, and the gravitational wave emission from this process, are important LISA science goals. To this end, we present results from numerical relativity simulations of binary black hole mergers using the so-called Lazarus approach to model gravitational radiation from these events. In particular, we focus here on some recent calculations of the final spin and recoil velocity of the remnant hole formed at the end of a binary black hole merger process, which may constraint the growth history of massive black holes at the c…
Attempts of Magain et al (2005) to detect the host galaxy of the bright QSO HE0450--2958 have not been successful. We suggest that the supermassive black hole powering the QSO was ejected from the observed ULIRG at the same redshift and at 1.5 arcsec distance. Ejection could have either be caused by recoil due to gravitational wave emission from a coalescing binary of supermassive black holes or the gravitational slingshot of three or more supermassive black holes in the ongoing merger of galaxies which triggered the starburst activity in the ULIRG. We discuss implications for the possible hie…
The ubiquity of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of nearby luminous galaxies can arise from the multiple mergers experienced by dark matter halos in hierarchical structure formation models, even if only a small fraction of these galaxies harbor SMBHs at high redshifts. We illustrate this possibility using cosmological Monte Carlo simulations of the merger history of dark matter halos and their associated SMBHs. In our most extreme models, in order to populate nearly every bright galaxy with a SMBH at z=0, only a few percent of the halos with virial temperatures above 10^4 K are …
When galaxies collide, dynamical friction drives their central supermassive black holes close enought to each other such that gravitational radiation becomes the leading dissipative effect. Gravitational radiation takes away energy, momentum and angular momentum from the compact binary, such that the black holes finally merge. In the process, the spin of the dominant black hole is reoriented. On observational level, the spins are directly related to the jets, which can be seen at radio frequencies. Images of the X-shaped radio galaxies together with evidence on the age of the jets illustrate t…
Disk galaxies with a spheroidal component are known to host Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) in their center. Unequal-mass galaxy mergers have been rarely studied despite the fact that they are the large majority of merging events by number and they are associated with the typical targets of gravitational wave experiments such as LISA. We performed N-body/SPH simulations of disk galaxy mergers with mass ratios 1:4 and 1:10 at redshifts z=0 and z=3. They have the highest resolution achieved so far for merging galaxies, and include star formation and supernova feedback. Gas dissipation is found …
We present the results of N-body simulations of the accretion of high-density dwarf galaxies by low-density giant galaxies. Both galaxies contain power-law central density cusps and point masses representing supermassive black holes; the ratio of galaxy masses is 3:1. The cusp of the dwarf galaxy is always disrupted during the merger, leading to a remnant with a weak power law in the intrinsic density and a ``core'' in the projected density. Removing both black holes from the giant and dwarf galaxies allows the dwarf galaxy to remain intact and leads to a remnant with a high central density, c…
We report the first results from evolutions of a generic black-hole binary, i.e. a binary containing unequal mass black holes with misaligned spins. Our configuration, which has a mass ratio of 2:1, consists of an initially non-spinning hole orbiting a larger, rapidly spinning hole (specific spin a/m = 0.885), with the spin direction oriented -45 degrees 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, more than twice as large as the maximum kick from non-spinning binaries. The remnant spin dire…
We model the spectra and light curves of circumbinary accretion disks during the time after the central black holes merge. The most immediate effect of this merger is the dissipation of energy in the outer regions of the disk due to the gravitational wave energy and linear momentum flux released at merger. This has the effect of perturbing the gas in the disk, which then radiates the dissipated energy over a cooling timescale, giving a characteristic infrared signal for tens of thousands of years when the total black hole mass is M~10^8 M_sun. On the basis of a simple cosmological merger model…
We study the possibility that minor mergers resolve the loss cone depletion problem, which is the difficulty occured in the coalescence process of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) binary, by performing numerical simulations with a highly accurate $N$-body code. We show that the minor merger of a dwarf galaxy disturbs stellar orbits in the galactic central region of the host galaxy where the loss cone depletion is already caused by the SMBH binary. The disturbed stars are supplied into the loss cone. Stars of the dwarf galaxy are also supplied into the loss cone. The gravitational interaction…
We study the evolution of disk accretion during the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in galactic nuclei. In hierarchical galaxy formation models, the most common binaries are likely to arise from minor galactic mergers, and have unequal mass black holes. Once such a binary becomes embedded in an accretion disk at a separation of the order of 0.1 pc, the merger proceeds in two distinct phases. During the first phase, the loss of orbital angular momentum to the gaseous disk shrinks the binary on a timescale of ~10 Myr. The accretion rate onto the primary black hole is not increased, an…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are a ubiquitous component of the nuclei of galaxies. It is normally assumed that, following the merger of two massive galaxies, a SMBH binary will form, shrink due to stellar or gas dynamical processes and ultimately coalesce by emitting a burst of gravitational waves. However, so far it has not been possible to show how two SMBHs bind during a galaxy merger with gas due to the difficulty of modeling a wide range of spatial scales. Here we report hydrodynamical simulations that track the formation of a SMBH binary down to scales of a few light years following …
We study the gravitational wave background produced from the formation and assembly of supermassive black holes within the cosmological paradigm of hierarchical structure formation. In particular, we focus on a supermassive black hole formation scenario in which the present-day population of supermassive black holes is built from high-mass seed black holes and we compute the concomitant spectrum of gravitational radiation produced by mergers of the seed black holes. We find that this scenario predicts a large, gravitational wave background that should be resolved into individual sources with s…
We examine the pairing process of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) down to scales of 20-100 pc using a set of N-body/SPH simulations of binary mergers of disk galaxies with mass ratios of 1:4 and 1:10. Our numerical experiments are designed to represent merger events occurring at various cosmic epochs. The initial conditions of the encounters are consistent with the LambdaCDM paradigm of structure formation, and the simulations include the effects of radiative cooling, star formation, and supernovae feedback. We find that the pairing of SMBHs depends sensitively on the amount of baryonic mass …
Angular momentum loss to circumbinary gas provides a possible mechanism for overcoming the `last parsec' problem and allowing the most massive black hole binaries formed from galactic mergers to coalesce. Here, we show that if gas disks also catalyze the merger of the somewhat lower mass binaries detectable with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), then there may be a purely gravitational wave signature of the role of gas in the form of a small but finite eccentricity just prior to merger. Numerical simulations suggest that eccentricity, excited by the interaction between the binary …
We consider the dynamical evolution of bound, hierarchical triples of supermassive black holes that might be formed in the nuclei of galaxies undergoing sequential mergers. The tidal force of the outer black hole on the inner binary produces eccentricity oscillations through the Kozai mechanism, and this can substantially reduce the gravitational wave merger time of the inner binary. We numerically calculate the merger time for a wide range of initial conditions and black hole mass ratios, including the effects of octupole interactions in the triple as well as general relativistic periastron p…
We present a new technique for observationally identifying galaxy mergers spectroscopically rather than through host galaxy imaging. Our technique exploits the dynamics of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in merger-remnant galaxies. Because structure in the universe is built up through galaxy mergers and nearly all galaxies host a central SMBH, some galaxies should possess two SMBHs near their centers as the result of a recent merger. These SMBHs spiral to the center of the resultant merger-remnant galaxy, and one or both of the SMBHs may power AGNs. Usin…
Massive black holes (MBHs), with masses in the range 10^3-10^8 Msolar, which merge with a companion black hole of similar mass are expected to be the most powerful source of gravitational radiation in the frequency range probed by LISA. MBH binaries can be detected by LISA up to z~5-15. Gravitational waves from MBH mergers can serve as a powerful tool to study the early evolution of the MBH population, and possibly the role played by MBHs in the joint evolution with their hosts. I review scenarios for the co-evolution of MBHs and cosmological structures, where MBH seeds form in pre-galactic st…
We assess models for the assembly of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the dark halo `merger tree'. We assume that the first `seed' black holes (BHs) formed in (mini)halos collapsing at z=20 from high-sigma density fluctuations. As these pregalactic holes become incorporated through a series of mergers into larger and larger halos, they sink to the center owing to dynamical friction, accrete a fraction of the gas in the merger remnant to become supermassive, form a binary system, and eventually coalesce. The merger histo…
Nuclear activity in galaxies is closely connected to galactic mergers and supermassive black holes (SBH). Galactic mergers perturb substantially the dynamics of gas and stellar population in the merging galaxies, and they are expected to lead to formation of supermassive binary black holes (BBH) in the center of mass of the galaxies merged. A scheme is proposed here that connects the peak magnitude of the nuclear activity with evolution of a BBH system. The scheme predicts correctly the relative fractions of different types of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and explains the connection between th…
Understanding how seed black holes grow into intermediate and supermassive black holes (IMBHs and SMBHs, respectively) has important implications for the duty-cycle of active galactic nuclei (AGN), galaxy evolution, and gravitational wave astronomy. Most studies of the cosmological growth and merger history of black holes have used semianalytic models and have concentrated on SMBH growth in luminous galaxies. Using high resolution cosmological N-body simulations, we track the assembly of black holes over a large range of final masses -- from seed black holes to SMBHs -- over widely varying dyn…
We investigate a hierarchical structure formation scenario in which galaxy stellar cores are created from the binding energy liberated by shrinking supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries. The binary orbital decay heats the surrounding stars, eroding a preexisting 1/r^2 stellar cusp. We follow the merger history of dark matter halos and associated SMBHs via cosmological Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy from early times to the present in a LCDM cosmology. Massive black holes get incorporated through a series of mergers into larger and larger halos, sink to the center owing to dy…
Recent numerical relativistic simulations of black hole coalescence suggest that in certain alignments the emission of gravitational radiation can produce a kick of several thousand kilometers per second. This exceeds galactic escape speeds, hence unless there a mechanism to prevent this, one would expect many galaxies that had merged to be without a central black hole. Here we show that in most galactic mergers, torques from accreting gas suffice to align the orbit and spins of both black holes with the large-scale gas flow. Such a configuration has a maximum kick speed <200 km/s, safely belo…
(Abridged) We develop a model for the cosmological role of mergers in the evolution of starbursts, quasars, and spheroidal galaxies. Combining halo mass functions (MFs) with empirical halo occupation models, we calculate where major galaxy-galaxy mergers occur and what kinds of galaxies merge, at all redshifts. We compare with observed merger MFs, clustering, fractions, and small-scale environments, and show that this yields robust estimates in good agreement with observations. Making the simple ansatz that major, gas-rich mergers cause quasar activity, we demonstrate that this naturally repro…
The activity of active galaxy may be triggered by the merge of galaxies and present-day galaxies are probably the product of successive minor mergers. The frequent galactic merges at high redshift imply that active galaxy harbors supermassive unequal-mass binary black holes in its center at least once during its life time. In this paper, we showed that the recently discovered double-lobed FR II radio galaxies are the remnants of such supermassive binary black holes. The inspiraling secondary black hole opens a gap in the accretion disk and removes the inner accretion disk when it merges into t…
(Abridged) We review the results of the first multi-scale, hydrodynamical simulations of mergers between galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to investigate the formation of SMBH binaries in galactic nuclei. We demonstrate that strong gas inflows produce nuclear disks at the centers of merger remnants whose properties depend sensitively on the details of gas thermodynamics. In numerical simulations with parsec-scale spatial resolution in the gas component and an effective equation of state appropriate for a starburst galaxy, we show that a SMBH binary forms very rapidly, less…
We analyze the effect of dissipation on the orbital evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) using high-resolution self-consistent gasdynamical simulations of binary equal- and unequal-mass mergers of disk galaxies. The galaxy models are consistent with the LCDM paradigm of structure formation and the simulations include the effects of radiative cooling and star formation. We find that equal-mass mergers always lead to the formation of a close SMBH pair at the center of the remnant with separations limited solely by the adopted force resolution of ~ 100 pc. Instead, the final SMBH separat…
I review scenarios for the assembly of supermassive black holes (MBHs) at the center of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the dark matter halo "merger tree". Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM cosmology, coupled to semi-analytical recipes, are a powerful tool to follow the merger history of halos and the dynamics and growth of the MBHs they host. X-ray photons from miniquasars powered by intermediate-mass "seed" holes may permeate the universe more uniformly than EUV radiation, make the low-density diffuse intergalactic medium warm and weakly ion…
We present a series of simulations of the self--regulated growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxies via three different fueling mechanisms: major mergers, minor mergers, and disk instabilities. The SMBHs in all three scenarios follow the same black hole fundamental plane (BHFP) and correlation with bulge binding energy seen in simulations of major mergers, and observed locally. Furthermore, provided that the total gas supply is significantly larger than the mass of the SMBH, its limiting mass is not influenced by the amount of gas available or the efficiency of black hole growth. …
Primordial stars are likely to be very massive >30 Msun, form in isolation, and will likely leave black holes as remnants in the centers of their host dark matter halos. We expect primordial stars to form in halos in the mass range 10^6-10^10 Msun. Some of these early black holes, formed at redshifts z>10, could be the seed black hole for a significant fraction of the supermassive black holes found in galaxies in the local universe. If the black hole descendants of the primordial stars exist, their mergers with nearby supermassive black holes may be a prime candidate for long wavelength gravit…
Recent studies have indicated that the emission of gravitational waves at the merger of two black holes gives a kick to the final black hole. If the supermassive black hole at the center of a disk galaxy is kicked but the velocity is not large enough to escape from the host galaxy, it will fall back onto the the disk and accrete the interstellar medium in the disk. We study the X-ray emission from the black holes with masses of ~10^7 M_sun recoiled from the galactic center with velocities of ~600 km s^-1. We find that their luminosities can reach ~>10^39 erg s^-1, when they pass the apastrons …
We present some simple models to determine whether or not the accretion of cold dark matter by supermassive black holes is astrophysically important. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we show that supermassive black holes cannot significantly alter a power law density cusp via accretion, whether during mergers or in the steady state.
Binary supermassive black holes are produced by galactic mergers as the black holes from the two galaxies fall to the center of the merged system and form a bound pair. The two black holes will eventually coalesce in an enormous burst of gravitational radiation. Here we show that the orientation of a black hole's spin axis would change dramatically even in a minor merger, leading to a sudden flip in the direction of any associated jet. We identify the winged or X-type radio sources with galaxies in which this has occurred. The implied coalescence rate is similar to the overall galaxy merger ra…
We propose that the gravitational collapse of supermassive objects ($ M\ga 10^4 M_\odot$), either as relativistic star clusters or as single supermassive stars (which may result from stellar mergers in dense star clusters), could be a cosmological source of $γ$-ray bursts. These events could provide the seeds of the supermassive black holes observed at the center of many galaxies. Collapsing supermassive objects will release a fraction of their huge gravitational binding energy as thermal neutrino pairs. We show that the accompanying neutrino/antineutrino annihilation-induced heating could dri…
We present 0.55 x 10^6 particle simulations of the accretion of high-density dwarf galaxies by low-density giant galaxies, using models that contain both power-law central density cusps and point masses representing supermassive black holes. The cusp of the dwarf galaxy is disrupted during the merger, producing a remnant with a central density that is only slightly higher than that of the giant galaxy initially. Removing the black hole from the giant galaxy allows the dwarf galaxy to remain intact and leads to a remnant with a high central density, contrary to what is observed. Our results sup…
AIMS: The cluster of hot stars observed in orbit around the central black hole of M31 has been interpreted as a 200 Myr starburst. The formation of a population of young stars in close proximity to a massive black hole presents a difficult challenge to star formation theory. We point out that in a high stellar density environment, the course of stellar evolution is modified by frequent collisions and mergers. METHODS: Blue stragglers, which are the results of mergers in globular clusters, occupy the same position in the color-magnitude diagram as the observed hot stars in M31. For confirmation…
We present an evolutionary model for starbursts, quasars, and spheroidal galaxies in which mergers between gas-rich galaxies drive nuclear inflows of gas, producing intense starbursts and feeding the buried growth of supermassive black holes (BHs) until feedback expels gas and renders a briefly visible optical quasar. The quasar lifetime and obscuring column density depend on both the instantaneous and peak luminosity of the quasar, and we determine this dependence using a large set of simulations of galaxy mergers varying host galaxy properties, orbital geometry, and gas physics. We use these…
The recently confirmed correlation between the mass of SMBH and bulges of galaxies (and their central velocity dispersion), suggest a common formation scenario for galaxies and their central black holes. Common fueling can be invoked through internal dynamical processes, external accretion, and hierarchical merging of structures. The success of recent theories is reviewed, as the self-regulated growth of both bulges and SMBHs, the predicted AGN statistics, when activity is triggered by accretion and mergers, the predicted frequency of binary SMBH and consequences. In particular, the SMBH growt…
If supermassive black holes (BHs) are generically present in galaxy centers, and if galaxies are built up through hierarchical merging, BH binaries are at least temporary features of most galactic bulges. Observations suggest, however, that binary BHs are rare, pointing towards a binary lifetime far shorter than the Hubble time. We show that, regardless of the detailed mechanism, all stellar-dynamical processes are insufficient to reduce significantly the orbital separation once orbital velocities in the binary exceed the virial velocity of the system. We propose that a massive gas disk surrou…
Primordial stars are likely to be very massive $\geq30\Msun$, form in isolation, and will likely leave black holes as remnants in the centers of their host dark matter halos in the mass range $10^{6}-10^{10}\Ms$. Such early black holes, at redshifts z$\gtsim10$, could be the seed black holes for the many supermassive black holes found in galaxies in the local universe. If they exist, their mergers with nearby supermassive black holes may be a prime signal for long wavelength gravitational wave detectors. We simulate formation of black holes in the center of high redshift dark matter halos and …
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies, and the available data show an empirical correlation between bulge luminosity - or stellar velocity dispersion - and black hole mass, suggesting a single mechanism for assembling black holes and forming spheroids in galaxy halos. The evidence is therefore in favour of a co-evolution between galaxies, black holes and quasars. In cold dark matter cosmogonies, small-mass subgalactic systems form first to merge later into larger and larger structures. In this paradigm galaxy halos experience multiple mergers d…
Supermassive black hole binaries may exist in the centers of active galactic nuclei like quasars and radio galaxies and mergers between galaxies may result in the formation of supermassive binaries during the course of galactic evolution. Using the very-long-baseline interferometer, we imaged the radio galaxy 3C 66B at radio frequencies and found that the unresolved radio core of 3C 66B shows well-defined elliptical motions with a period of 1.05 +/- 0.03 years, which provides a direct detection of a supermassive black hole binary.
Recent studies have shown that during their coalescence, binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) experience a gravitational recoil with velocities of 100 km/s < v(kick) < 600 km/s. These velocities exceed the escape velocity v(esc) from typical dark matter (DM) halos at high-redshift (z>6), and therefore put constraints on scenarios in which early SMBHs grow at the centers of DM halos. Here we quantify these constraints for the most distant known SMBHs, with inferred masses in excess of 10^9 M(sun), powering the bright quasars discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at z>6. We assume that t…
