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Register a new userObservational signatures of disk and jet misalignment in images of accreting black holes
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Black hole accretion is one of natures most efficient energy extraction processes. When gas falls in, a significant fraction of its gravitational binding energy is either converted into radiation or flows outwards in the form of black hole-driven jets and disk-driven winds. Recently, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an Earth-size sub-millimetre radio interferometer, captured the first images of M87s black hole. These images were analysed and interpreted using general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) models of accretion disks with rotation axes aligned with the black hole spin axis. However, since infalling gas is often insensitive to the black hole spin direction, misalignment between accretion disk and black hole spin may be a common occurrence in nature. In this work, we use the general-relativistic radiative transfer (GRRT) code texttt{BHOSS} to calculate the first synthetic radio images of (highly) tilted disk/jet models generated by our GPU-accelerated GRMHD code texttt{HAMR}. While the tilt does not have a noticeable effect on the system dynamics beyond a few tens of gravitational radii from the black hole, the warping of the disk and jet can imprint observable signatures in EHT images on smaller scales. Comparing the images from our GRMHD models to the 43 GHz and 230 GHz EHT images of M87, we find that M87 may feature a tilted disk/jet system. Further, tilted disks and jets display significant time variability in the 230 GHz flux that can be further tested by longer-duration EHT observations of M87.
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We show that accreting black hole systems could be sources for keV light dark matter flux through several different mechanisms. We discuss two types of systems: coronal thermal plasmas around supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and accretion disks of stellar-mass X-ray black hole binaries (BHBs). We explore how these black hole systems may produce keV light dark matter fluxes and find that in order to account for the XENON1T excess, the dark fluxes from the observed AGNs and BHBs sources have to exceed the Eddington limit. We also extend the black hole mass region to primordial black holes (PBHs) and discuss the possibility of contributing to keV light dark flux via superradiance or Hawking radiation of PBHs. Besides, black holes can be good accelerators to accrete and boost heavy dark matter particles. If considering collisions or dark electromagnetism, those particles could then escape and reach the benchmark speed of 0.1c at the XENON1T detector.
We present post-Newtonian $N$-body simulations on mergers of accreting stellar-mass black holes (BHs), where such general relativistic effects as the pericenter shift and gravitational wave (GW) emission are taken into consideration. The attention is concentrated on the effects of the dynamical friction and the Hoyle-Lyttleton mass accretion by ambient gas. We consider a system composed of ten BHs with initial mass of $30~M_odot$. As a result, we show that mergers of accreting stellar-mass BHs are classified into four types: a gas drag-driven, an interplay-driven, a three body-driven, or an accretion-driven merger. We find that BH mergers proceed before significant mass accretion, even if the accretion rate is $sim10$ Eddington accretion rate, and then all BHs can merge into one heavy BH. Using the simulation results for a wide range of parameters, we derive a critical accretion rate ($dot{m}_{rm c}$), below which the BH growth is promoted faster by mergers. Also, it is found that the effect of the recoil by the GW emission can reduce $dot{m}_{rm c}$ especially in gas number density higher than $10^8~{rm cm}^{-3}$, and enhance the escape probability of merged BHs. Very recently, a gravitational wave event, GW150914, as a result of the merger of a $sim 30~M_odot$ BH binary has been detected (Abbott et al. 2016). Based on the present simulations, the BH merger in GW150914 is likely to be driven by three-body encounters accompanied by a few $M_odot$ of gas accretion, in high-density environments like dense interstellar clouds or galactic nuclei.
Rotating supermassive black holes produce jets and their origin is connected to magnetic field that is generated by accreting matter flow. There is a point of view that electromagnetic fields around rotating black holes are brought to the hole by accretion. In this situation the prograde accreting disks produce weaker large-scale black hole threading magnetic fields, implying weaker jets that in retrograde regimes. The basic goal of this paper is to find the best candidates for retrograde accreting systems in observed active galactic nuclei. We show that active galactic nuclei with low Eddington ratio are really the best candidates for retrograde systems. This conclusion is obtained for kinetically dominated FRII radio galaxies, flat spectrum radio loud narrow line Seyfert I galaxies and a number of nearby galaxies. Our conclusion is that the best candidates for retrograde systems are the noticeable population of active galactic nuclei in the Universe. This result corresponds to the conclusion that in the merging process the interaction of merging black holes with a retrograde circumbinary disk is considerably more effective for shrinking the binary system.
In this paper, we explore the mechanisms that regulate the formation and evolution of stellar black hole binaries (BHBs) around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We show that dynamical interactions can efficiently drive in-situ BHB formation if the SMBH is surrounded by a massive nuclear cluster (NC), while orbitally segregated star clusters can replenish the BHB reservoir in SMBH-dominated nuclei. We discuss how the combined action of stellar hardening and mass segregation sculpts the BHB orbital properties. We use direct N-body simulations including post-Newtonian corrections up to 2.5 order to study the BHB-SMBH interplay, showing that the Kozai-Lidov mechanism plays a crucial role in shortening binaries lifetime. We find that the merging probability weakly depends on the SMBH mass in the $10^6-10^9{rm ~M}_odot$ mass range, leading to a merger rate $Gamma simeq 3-8$ yr$^{-1}$ Gpc$^{-3}$ at redshift zero. Nearly $40%$ of the mergers have masses in the BH mass gap, $50-140{rm ~M}_odot$, thus indicating that galactic nuclei are ideal places to form BHs in this mass range. We argue that gravitational wave (GW) sources with components mass $m_1>40{rm ~M}_odot$ and $m_2<30{rm ~M}_odot$ would represent a strong indicator of a galactic nuclei origin. The majority of these mergers could be multiband GW sources in the local Universe: nearly $40%$ might be seen by LISA as eccentric sources and, a few years later, as circular sources by LIGO and the Einstein Telescope, making decihertz observatories like DECIGO unique instruments to bridge the observations during the binary inspiral.
Major galaxy mergers are thought to play an important part in fuelling the growth of supermassive black holes. However, observational support for this hypothesis is mixed, with some studies showing a correlation between merging galaxies and luminous quasars and others showing no such association. Recent observations have shown that a black hole is likely to become heavily obscured behind merger-driven gas and dust, even in the early stages of the merger, when the galaxies are well separated (5 to 40 kiloparsecs). Merger simulations further suggest that such obscuration and black-hole accretion peaks in the final merger stage, when the two galactic nuclei are closely separated (less than 3 kiloparsecs). Resolving this final stage requires a combination of high-spatial-resolution infrared imaging and high-sensitivity hard-X-ray observations to detect highly obscured sources. However, large numbers of obscured luminous accreting supermassive black holes have been recently detected nearby (distances below 250 megaparsecs) in X-ray observations. Here we report high-resolution infrared observations of hard-X-ray-selected black holes and the discovery of obscured nuclear mergers, the parent populations of supermassive-black-hole mergers. We find that obscured luminous black holes (bolometric luminosity higher than 2x10^44 ergs per second) show a significant (P<0.001) excess of late-stage nuclear mergers (17.6 per cent) compared to a sample of inactive galaxies with matching stellar masses and star formation rates (1.1 per cent), in agreement with theoretical predictions. Using hydrodynamic simulations, we confirm that the excess of nuclear mergers is indeed strongest for gas-rich major-merger hosts of obscured luminous black holes in this final stage.
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