We present a method to search for gravitational waves from coalescing supermassive binary black holes in LISA data. The search utilizes the $\mathcal{F}$-statistic to maximize over, and determine the values of, the extrinsic parameters of the binary system. The intrinsic parameters are searched over hierarchically using stochastically generated multi-dimensional template banks to recover the masses and sky locations of the binary. We present the results of this method applied to the mock LISA data Challenge 1B data set.
Vast amounts of entropy are produced in black hole formation, and the amount of entropy stored in supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is now much greater than the entropy free in the rest of the universe. Either mergers involved in forming supermassive black holes are rare,or the holes must be very efficient at capturing nearly all the entropy generated in the process. We argue that this information can be used to constrain supermassive black hole production, and may eventually provide a check on numerical results for mergers involving black holes.
The observation of gravitational-waves from merging supermassive black holes will be transformative: the detection of a low-frequency gravitational-wave background can tell us if and how supermassive black holes merge, inform our knowledge of galaxy merger rates and supermassive black hole masses, and enable the possibility of detecting new physics at nanohertz frequencies. All we have to do is time pulsars.
Recent calculations of the recoil velocity in binary black hole mergers have found the kick velocity to be of the order of a few hundred km/s in the case of non-spinning binaries and about $500 $km/s in the case of spinning configurations, and have lead to predictions of a maximum kick of up to $1300 $km/s. We test these predictions and demonstrate that kick velocities of at least $2500 $km/s are possible for equal-mass binaries with anti-aligned spins in the orbital plane. Kicks of that magnitude are likely to have significant repercussions for models of black-hole formation, the population o…
We study the general relativitic (GR) effects induced by a spinning supermassive black hole on the orbital and spin evolution of a merging black hole binary (BHB) in a hierarchical triple system. A sufficiently inclined outer orbit can excite Lidov-Kozai eccentricity oscillations in the BHB and induce its merger. These GR effects generate extra precessions on the BHB orbits and spins, significantly increasing the inclination window for mergers and producing a wide range of spin orientations when the BHB enters LIGO band. This "GR-enhanced" channel may play an important role in BHB mergers.
We present a new type of observation relating the gravitational wave emission of supermassive black hole mergers to their electromagnetic counterparts. This dual emission involves variability of a relativistic jet arising from the spin-orbit precession of the supermassive black hole binary at its base.
The study of galaxy mergers and supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) is central to our understanding of the galaxy and black hole assembly and (co-)evolution at the epoch of structure formation and throughout cosmic history. Galaxy mergers are the sites of major accretion episodes, they power quasars, grow supermassive black holes (SMBHs), and drive SMBH-host scaling relations. The coalescing SMBBHs at their centers are the loudest sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the universe, and the subsequent GW recoil has a variety of potential astrophysical implications which are still under e…
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…
Modeling the late inspiral and merger of supermassive black holes is central to understanding accretion processes and the conditions under which electromagnetic emission accompanies gravitational waves. We use fully general relativistic, hydrodynamics simulations to investigate how electromagnetic signatures correlate with black hole spins, mass ratios, and the gaseous environment in this final phase of binary evolution. In all scenarios, we find some form of characteristic electromagnetic variability whose pattern depends on the spins and binary mass ratios. Binaries in hot accretion flows ex…
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…
The postmerger gravitational-wave (GW) signal of a binary neutron star (BNS) merger is expected to contain valuable information that could shed light on the equation of state (EOS) of NSs, the properties of the matter produced during the merger, as well as the nature of any potential intermediate merger product such as hypermassive or supramassive NSs. However, the postmerger lies in the high frequency regime ($ \gtrsim 1000 $ Hz) where current LIGO-Virgo detectors are insensitive. While proposed detectors such as NEMO, Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope could potentially detect the postme…
As a powerful source of gravitational waves (GW), a supermassive black hole (SMBH) merger may be accompanied by a relativistic jet that leads to detectable electromagnetic (EM) emission. We model the propagation of post-merger jets inside a pre-merger circumnuclear environment formed by disk winds, and calculate multi-wavelength EM spectra from the forward shock region. We show that the non-thermal EM signals from SMBH mergers are detectable up to the detection horizon of future GW facilities such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Calculations based on our model predict slowly …
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…
One of the central goals of LISA is the detection of gravitational waves from the merger of supermassive black holes. Contrary to stellar-mass black hole mergers, such events are expected to be rich X-ray sources due to the accretion of material from the circumbinary disks onto the black holes. The orbital dynamics before merger is also expected to modulate the resulting X-ray emission via Doppler boosting in a quasi-periodic way, and in a simple phase relation with the gravitational wave from the inspiral of the black holes. Detecting the X-ray source would enable a precise and early localiza…
Coincident detections of electromagnetic (EM) and gravitational wave (GW) signatures from coalescence events of supermassive black holes are the next observational grand challenge. Such detections will provide the means to study cosmological evolution and accretion processes associated with these gargantuan compact objects. More generally, the observations will enable testing general relativity in the strong, nonlinear regime and will provide independent cosmological measurements to high precision. Understanding the conditions under which coincidences of EM and GW signatures arise during super…
We prove that merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) typically have neither equal masses, nor is their mass ratio too extreme. The majority of such mergers fall into the mass ratio range of 1:30 to 1:3, implying a spin flip during the inspiral. We also present a simple expression for the final spin $χ_{f}$ of the emerging SMBH, as function of the mass ratio, initial spin magnitudes, and orientation of the spins with respect to the orbital plane and each other. This formula approximates well more cumbersome expressions obtained from the fit with numerical simulations. By integrating over all …
The environment surrounding supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei (GNs) is expected to harbour stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) populations. These binaries were suggested to form a hierarchical triple system with the SMBH, and gravitational perturbations from the SMBH can enhance the mergers of BBHs through Lidov-Kozai (LK) oscillations. Previous studies determined the expected binary parameter distribution for this merger channel in single GNs. Here we account for the different spatial distribution and mass distribution models of BBHs around SMBHs and perform direct high-pre…
We present the first fully relativistic prediction of the electromagnetic emission from the surrounding gas of a supermassive binary black hole system approaching merger. Using a ray-tracing code to post-process data from a general relativistic 3-d MHD simulation, we generate images and spectra, and analyze the viewing angle dependence of the light emitted. When the accretion rate is relatively high, the circumbinary disk, accretion streams, and mini-disks combine to emit light in the UV/EUV bands. We posit a thermal Compton hard X-ray spectrum for coronal emission; at high accretion rates, it…
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHs) are a fascinating byproduct of galaxy mergers in the hierarchical universe. In the last stage of their orbital evolution, gravitational wave radiation drives the binary inspiral and produces the loudest siren awaiting to be detected by gravitational wave observatories. Periodically varying emission from active galactic nuclei has been proposed as a powerful approach to probe such systems, although none of the identified candidates are close to their final coalescence such that the observed periods stay constant in time. In this work, we report on the fi…
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…
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 preced…
We estimate the merger timescale of spectroscopically-selected, subparsec supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) candidates by comparing their expected contribution to the gravitational wave background (GWB) with the sensitivity of current pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments and in particular, with the latest upper limit placed by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). We find that the average timescale to coalescence of such SMBHBs is $\langle t_{\rm evol} \rangle > 6\times 10^4\,$yr, assuming that their orbital evolution in the PTA frequency band is dr…
Supermassive black hole (SMBH) coalescences are ubiquitous in the history of the Universe and often exhibit strong accretion activities and powerful jets. These SMBH mergers are also promising candidates for future gravitational wave detectors such as Laser Space Inteferometric Antenna (LISA). In this work, we consider neutrino counterpart emission originating from the jet-induced shocks. The physical picture is that relativistic jets launched after the merger will push forward inside the premerger disk wind material, and then they subsequently get collimated, leading to the formation of inter…
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…
In dense stellar environments, the merger products of binary black hole mergers may undergo additional mergers. These hierarchical mergers are predicted to have higher masses than the first generation of black holes made from stars. The components of hierarchical mergers are expected to have significant characteristic spins $χ\sim 0.7$. However, since the population properties of first-generation black holes are uncertain, it is difficult to know if any given merger is first-generation or hierarchical. We use observations of gravitational waves to reconstruct the binary black hole mass and spi…
Gravitational-wave background from supermassive black holes without merger trees: Tidally regulated mergers and direct inference from the NANOGrav 15 yr data
GRAPPA Institute, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学 GRAPPA 研究所）；Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI), University of Tokyo（东京大学 宇宙物理数学 Kavli 研究所）
During post-Newtonian evolution of a compact binary, a mass ratio different from 1 provides a second small parameter, which can lead to unexpected results. We present a statistics of supermassive black hole candidates, which enables us first to derive their mass distribution, then to establish a logarithmically even probability of the mass ratios at their encounter. In the mass ratio range (1/30,1/3) of supermassive black hole mergers representing 40% of all possible cases, the combined effect of spin-orbit precession and gravitational radiation leads to a spin-flip of the dominant spin during…
We compare the science capabilities of different eLISA mission designs, including four-link (two-arm) and six-link (three-arm) configurations with different arm lengths, low-frequency noise sensitivities and mission durations. For each of these configurations we consider a few representative massive black hole formation scenarios. These scenarios are chosen to explore two physical mechanisms that greatly affect eLISA rates, namely (i) black hole seeding, and (ii) the delays between the merger of two galaxies and the merger of the black holes hosted by those galaxies. We assess the eLISA parame…
Super-Eddington accretion is very efficient in growing the mass of a black hole: in a fraction of the Eddington time its mass can grow to an arbitrary large value if the feedback effect is not taken into account. However, since super-Eddington accretion has a very low radiation efficiency, people have argued against it as a major process for the growth of the black holes in quasars since observations have constrained the average accretion efficiency of the black holes in quasars to be $\ga 0.1$. In this paper we show that the observational constraint does not need to be violated if the black h…
In this letter we carry out the first systematic investigation of the expected gravitational wave (GW) background generated by supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries in the nHz frequency band accessible to pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). We take from the literature several estimates of the redshift dependent galaxy mass function and of the fraction of close galaxy pairs to derive a wide range of galaxy merger rates. We then exploit empirical black hole-host relations to populate merging galaxies with SMBHs. The result of our procedure is a collection of a large number of phenomenological SMBH bi…
The occurrence of pair-instability supernovae is predicted to prevent the formation of black holes with masses $\gtrsim 50 M_\odot$. Recent gravitational-wave detections in this mass range require an explanation beyond that of standard stellar collapse. Current modeling strategies include the hierarchical assembly of previous generations of black-hole mergers as well as other mechanisms of astrophysical nature (lowered nuclear-reaction rates, envelope retention, stellar mergers, accretion, dredge-up episodes). In this paper, we point out the occurrence of an exclusion region that cannot be eas…
In this paper we continue the first ever study of magnetized mini-disks coupled to circumbinary accretion in a supermassive binary black hole (SMBBH) approaching merger reported in Bowen et al. 2018. We extend this simulation from 3 to 12 binary orbital periods. We find that relativistic SMBBH accretion acts as a resonant cavity, where quasi-periodic oscillations tied to the the frequency at which the black hole's orbital phase matches a non-linear $m=1$ density feature, or ``lump'', in the circumbinary accretion disk permeate the system. The rate of mass accretion onto each of the mini-disks …
We perform magnetohydrodynamic simulations in full general relativity of disk accretion onto nonspinning black hole binaries with mass ratio 36:29. We survey different disk models which differ in their scale height, total size and magnetic field to quantify the robustness of previous simulations on the initial disk model. Scaling our simulations to LIGO GW150914 we find that such systems could explain possible gravitational wave and electromagnetic counterparts such as the Fermi GBM hard X-ray signal reported 0.4s after GW150915 ended. Scaling our simulations to supermassive binary black holes…
Stellar-mass black hole binaries (BHBs) near supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galactic nuclei undergo eccentricity oscillations due to gravitational perturbations from the SMBH. Previous works have shown that this channel can contribute to the overall BHB merger rate detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Interferometer. Significantly, the SMBH gravitational perturbations on the binary's orbit may produce eccentric BHBs which are expected to be visible using the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) for a large fraction of their life…
Coalescing supermassive black hole binaries are produced by the mergers of galaxies and are the most powerful sources of gravitational waves accessible to space-based gravitational observatories. Some such mergers may occur in the presence of matter and magnetic fields and hence generate an electromagnetic counterpart. In this Letter, we present the first general relativistic simulations of magnetized plasma around merging supermassive black holes using the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic code Whisky. By considering different magnetic field strengths, going from non-magnetically domin…
Ultralight bosons are a proposed solution to outstanding problems in cosmology and particle physics: they provide a dark-matter candidate while potentially explaining the strong charge-parity problem. If they exist, ultralight bosons can interact with black holes through the superradiant instability. In this work we explore the consequences of this instability on the evolution of hierarchical black holes within dense stellar clusters. By reducing the spin of individual black holes, superradiance reduce the recoil velocity of merging binary black holes, which, in turn, increases the retention f…
We review theoretical findings, astrophysical modeling, and current gravitational-wave evidence of hierarchical stellar-mass black-hole mergers. While most of the compact binary mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo are expected to consist of first-generation black holes formed from the collapse of stars, others might instead be of second (or higher) generation, containing the remnants of previous black-hole mergers. Such a subpopulation of hierarchically assembled black holes presents distinctive gravitational-wave signatures, namely higher masses, possibly within the pair-instability mass gap, …
With better statistics and precision, eccentricity could prove to be a useful tool for understanding the origin and environment of binary black holes. Hierarchical triples in particular, which might be abundant in globular clusters and galactic nuclei, could generate observably large eccentricity at LIGO and future gravitational wave detectors. Measuring the eccentricity distribution accurately could help us probe the background and the formation of the mergers. In this paper we continue our previous investigation and improve our semi-analytical description of the eccentricity distribution of …
Given the stellar density near the galactic center, close encounters between compact object binaries and the supermassive black hole are a plausible occurrence. We present results from a numerical study of close to 13 million such encounters. Consistent with previous studies, we corroborate that, for binary systems tidally disrupted by the black hole, the component of the binary remaining bound to the hole has eccentricity ~ 0.97 and circularizes dramatically by the time it enters the classical LISA band. Our results also show that the population of surviving binaries merits attention. These b…
