Bence Kocsis

Abstract:

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) found direct evidence for double black hole binaries emitting gravitational waves. Galactic nuclei are expected to harbor the densest population of stellar-mass black holes. A significant fraction (∼30%) of these black holes can reside in binaries. We examine the fate of the black hole binaries in active galactic nuclei, which get trapped in the inner region of the accretion disk around the central supermassive black hole. We show that binary black holes can migrate into and then rapidly merge within the disk well within a Salpeter time. The binaries may also accrete a significant amount of gas from the disk, well above the Eddington rate. This could lead to detectable X-ray or gamma-ray emission, but would require hyper- Eddington accretion with a few percent radiative efficiency, comparable to thin disks. We discuss implications for gravitational-wave observations and black hole population studies. We estimate that Advanced LIGO may detect ∼20 such gas-induced binary mergers per year.

Abstract:

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has recently discovered gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by merging black hole binaries. We examine whether future GW detections may identify triple companions of merging binaries. Such a triple companion causes variations in the GW signal due to: (1) the varying path length along the line of sight during the orbit around the center of mass; (2) relativistic beaming, Doppler, and gravitational redshift; (3) the variation of the light-travel time in the gravitational field of the triple companion; and (4) secular variations of the orbital elements. We find that the prospects for detecting a triple companion are the highest for low-mass compact object binaries which spend the longest time in the LIGO frequency band. In particular, for merging neutron star binaries, LIGO may detect a white dwarf or M-dwarf perturber at a signal-to-noise ratio of 8, if it is within 0.4 R⊙ distance from the binary and the system is within a distance of 100 Mpc. Stellar mass (supermassive) black hole perturbers may be detected at a factor 5 × (103×) larger separations. Such pertubers in orbit around a merging binary emit GWs at frequencies above 1 mHz detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna in coincidence.