Consequences of Triaxiality for Gravitational Wave Recoil of Black Holes

Vicari, A.; Capuzzo–Dolcetta, R.; Merritt, David

doi:10.1086/518116

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…1 Owing to asphericities in the dark matter potential, the black hole's orbits are highly nonradial, resulting in a significantly increased decay timescale compared to the spherical case. This is in qualitative agreement with earlier results by Vicari et al (2007). 2 In a triaxial NFW halo return timescales to the center exceed 5 Gyr already for V kick = 200 km s −1 , and are longer than the Hubble time for V kick 250 km s −1 .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Simulations of Recoiling Massive Black Holes in the via Lactea Halo

Guedes¹,

Madau²,

Kuhlen³

et al. 2009

ApJ

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The coalescence of a massive black hole (MBH) binary leads to the gravitational-wave recoil of the system and its ejection from the galaxy core. We have carried out N-body simulations of the motion of a M BH = 3.7 × 10 6 M MBH remnant in the "Via Lactea I" simulation, a Milky Way-sized dark matter halo. The black hole receives a recoil velocity of V kick = 80, 120, 200, 300, and 400 km s −1 at redshift 1.5, and its orbit is followed for over 1 Gyr within a "live" host halo, subject only to gravity and dynamical friction against the dark matter background. We show that, owing to asphericities in the dark matter potential, the orbit of the MBH is highly nonradial, resulting in a significantly increased decay timescale compared to a spherical halo. The simulations are used to construct a semi-analytic model of the motion of the MBH in a time-varying triaxial Navarro-Frenk-White dark matter halo plus a spherical stellar bulge, where the dynamical friction force is calculated directly from the velocity dispersion tensor. Such a model should offer a realistic picture of the dynamics of kicked MBHs in situations where gas drag, friction by disk stars, and the flattening of the central cusp by the returning black hole are all negligible effects. We find that MBHs ejected with initial recoil velocities V kick 500 km s −1 do not return to the host center within a Hubble time. In a Milky Way-sized galaxy, a recoiling hole carrying a gaseous disk of initial mass ∼ M BH may shine as a quasar for a substantial fraction of its "wandering" phase. The long decay timescales of kicked MBHs predicted by this study may thus be favorable to the detection of off-nuclear quasar activity.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Simulations of Recoiling Massive Black Holes in the via Lactea Halo

Guedes¹,

Madau²,

Kuhlen³

et al. 2009

ApJ

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“…Actually, the triaxiality cannot change our results significantly because the influence of triaxiality is moderate in galaxy models with shallow central density profiles (Vicari et al 2007). Thus, our calculations with γ = 0.5 will not significantly depart from the triaxial model.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…For most real bulges/ellipticals, their stellar distributions are non-spherical. As argued by Vicari et al (2007), the orbital decay timescales of the recoiling SMBHs are prolonged in triaxial galaxies compared with spherical galaxies. That is because most of the recoiling SMBHs in triaxial galaxies cannot return directly to their galactic centers, where the influences of dynamical friction are the strongest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Interaction of Recoiling Supermassive Black Holes With Stars in Galactic Nuclei

Liu

Berczik

et al. 2012

ApJ

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Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are the products of frequent galaxy mergers. The coalescence of the SMBHBs is a distinct source of gravitational wave (GW) radiation. The detections of the strong GW radiation and their possible electromagnetic counterparts are essential. Numerical relativity suggests that the post-merger supermassive black hole (SMBH) gets a kick velocity up to 4000 km s −1 due to the anisotropic GW radiations. Here, we investigate the dynamical coevolution and interaction of the recoiling SMBHs and their galactic stellar environments with one million direct N-body simulations including the stellar tidal disruption by the recoiling SMBHs. Our results show that the accretion of disrupted stars does not significantly affect the SMBH dynamical evolution. We investigate the stellar tidal disruption rates as a function of the dynamical evolution of oscillating SMBHs in the galactic nuclei. Our simulations show that most stellar tidal disruptions are contributed by the unbound stars and occur when the oscillating SMBHs pass through the galactic center. The averaged disruption rate is ∼10 −6 M yr −1 , which is about an order of magnitude lower than that by a stationary SMBH at similar galactic nuclei. Our results also show that a bound star cluster is around the oscillating SMBH of about ∼0.7% the black hole mass. In addition, we discover a massive cloud of unbound stars following the oscillating SMBH. We also investigate the dependence of the results on the SMBH masses and density slopes of the galactic nuclei.

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“…Binney 1977;Pesce et al 1992;Cora et al 2001;Vicari et al 2007) in a more self-consistent way (including possible feedback on the galaxy shape). A related idea was recently explored by Brockamp et al (2014), although their generic machinery of basis-set expansion was only applied for the spherical case.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new Monte Carlo method for dynamical evolution of non-spherical stellar systems

Vasiliev

2014

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We have developed a novel Monte Carlo method for simulating the dynamical evolution of stellar systems in arbitrary geometry. The orbits of stars are followed in a smooth potential represented by a basis-set expansion and perturbed after each timestep using local velocity diffusion coefficients from the standard two-body relaxation theory. The potential and diffusion coefficients are updated after an interval of time that is a small fraction of the relaxation time, but may be longer than the dynamical time. Thus our approach is a bridge between the Spitzer's formulation of the Monte Carlo method and the temporally smoothed self-consistent field method. The primary advantages are the ability to follow the secular evolution of shape of the stellar system, and the possibility of scaling the amount of two-body relaxation to the necessary value, unrelated to the actual number of particles in the simulation. Possible future applications of this approach in galaxy dynamics include the problem of consumption of stars by a massive black hole in a non-spherical galactic nucleus, evolution of binary supermassive black holes, and the influence of chaos on the shape of galaxies, while for globular clusters it may be used for studying the influence of rotation.

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Consequences of Triaxiality for Gravitational Wave Recoil of Black Holes

Cited by 20 publications

References 48 publications

Simulations of Recoiling Massive Black Holes in the via Lactea Halo

Simulations of Recoiling Massive Black Holes in the via Lactea Halo

Interaction of Recoiling Supermassive Black Holes With Stars in Galactic Nuclei

A new Monte Carlo method for dynamical evolution of non-spherical stellar systems

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