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Powerful flares from recoiling black holes in quasars

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 Added by Erin Wells Bonning
 Publication date 2008
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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Mergers of spinning black holes can give recoil velocities from gravitational radiation up to several thousand km/s. A recoiling supermassive black hole in an AGN retains the inner part of its accretion disk. Marginally bound material rejoining the disk around the moving black hole releases a large amount of energy in shocks in a short time, leading to a flare in thermal soft X-rays with a luminosity approaching the Eddington limit. Reprocessing of the X-rays by the infalling material gives strong optical and ultraviolet emission lines with a distinctive spectrum. Despite the short lifetime of the flare (~10^4 yr), as many as 100 flares may be in play at the present time in QSOs at redshifts ~ 1 to 3. These flares provide a means to identify high velocity recoils.



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124 - E. W. Bonning 2007
Recent simulations of merging black holes with spin give recoil velocities from gravitational radiation up to several thousand km/s. A recoiling supermassive black hole can retain the inner part of its accretion disk, providing fuel for a continuing QSO phase lasting millions of years as the hole moves away from the galactic nucleus. One possible observational manifestation of a recoiling accretion disk is in QSO emission lines shifted in velocity from the host galaxy. We have examined QSOs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with broad emission lines substantially shifted relative to the narrow lines. We find no convincing evidence for recoiling black holes carrying accretion disks. We place an upper limit on the incidence of recoiling black holes in QSOs of 4% for kicks greater than 500 km/s and 0.35% for kicks greater than 1000 km/s line-of-sight velocity.
Gravitational-wave (GW) recoil of merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) may influence the co-evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies. We examine this possibility using SPH/N-body simulations of gaseous galaxy mergers in which the merged BH receives a recoil kick. With our suite of over 200 merger simulations, we identify systematic trends in the behavior of recoiling BHs. Our main results are as follows. (1) While BHs kicked at nearly the central escape speed (vesc) are essentially lost to the galaxy, in gas rich mergers, BHs kicked with up to about 0.7 vesc may be confined to the central few kpc of the galaxy. (2) The inflow of cold gas during a gas-rich major merger may cause a rapid increase in central escape speed; in such cases recoil trajectories will depend on the timing of the BH merger relative to the change in vesc. (3) Recoil events generally reduce the lifetimes of bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) but may actually extend AGN lifetimes at lower luminosities. (4) Recoiling AGN may be observable via kinematic offsets (v > 500 km s^-1) or spatial offsets (R > 1 kpc) for lifetimes of up to about 10 - 100 Myr. (5) Rapidly-recoiling BHs may be up to about 5 times less massive than their stationary counterparts. These mass deficits lower the normalization of the M - sigma relation and contribute to both intrinsic and overall scatter. (6) Finally, the displacement of AGN feedback by a recoil event causes higher central star formation rates in the merger remnant, thereby extending the starburst phase of the merger and creating a denser, more massive stellar cusp.
We present an analysis of ionized X-ray disk winds observed in the Fe K band of four stellar-mass black holes observed with Chandra, including 4U 1630-47, GRO J1655-40, H 1743-322, and GRS 1915+105. High-resolution photoionization grids were generated in order to model the data. Third-order gratings spectra were used to resolve complex absorption profiles into atomic effects and multiple velocity components. The Fe XXV line is found to be shaped by contributions from the intercombination line (in absorption), and the Fe XXVI line is detected as a spin-orbit doublet. The data require 2-3 absorption zones, depending on the source. The fastest components have velocities approaching or exceeding 0.01c, increasing mass outflow rates and wind kinetic power by orders of magnitude over prior single-zone models. The first-order spectra require re-emission from the wind, broadened by a degree that is loosely consistent with Keplerian orbital velocities at the photoionization radius. This suggests that disk winds are rotating with the orbital velocity of the underlying disk, and provides a new means of estimating launching radii -- crucial to understanding wind driving mechanisms. Some aspects of the wind velocities and radii correspond well to the broad-line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei, suggesting a physical connection. We discuss these results in terms of prevalent models for disk wind production and disk accretion itself, and implications for massive black holes in active galactic nuclei.
A supermassive black hole ejected from the center of a galaxy by gravitational wave recoil carries a retinue of bound stars - a hypercompact stellar system (HCSS). The numbers and properties of HCSSs contain information about the merger histories of galaxies, the late evolution of binary black holes, and the distribution of gravitational-wave kicks. We relate the structural properties of HCSSs to the properties of their host galaxies, in two regimes: collisional, i.e. short nuclear relaxation times; and collisionless, i.e. long nuclear relaxtion times. HCSSs are expected to be similar in size and luminosity to globular clustersbut in extreme cases their stellar mass can approach that of UCDs. However they differ from all other classes of compact stellar system in having very high internal velocities. We show that the kick velocity is encoded in the velocity dispersion of the bound stars. Given a large enough sample of HCSSs, the distribution of gravitational-wave kicks can therefore be empirically determined. We combine a hierarchical merger algorithm with stellar population models to compute the rate of production of HCSSs over time and the probability of observing HCSSs in the local universe as a function of their apparent magnitude, color, size and velocity dispersion, under two assumptions about the star formation history prior to the kick. We predict that roughly 100 should be detectable within 2 Mpc of the center of the Virgo cluster and that many of these should be bright enough that their high internal velocity dispersions could be measured with reasonable exposure times.
Binary black holes emit gravitational radiation with net linear momentum leading to a retreat of the final remnant black hole that can reach up to $sim5,000$ km/s. Full numerical relativity simulations are the only tool to accurately compute these recoils since they are largely produced when the black hole horizons are about to merge and they are strongly dependent on their spin orientations at that moment. We present eight new numerical simulations of BBH in the hangup-kick configuration family, leading to the maximum recoil. Black holes are equal mass and near maximally spinning ($|vec{S}_{1,2}|/m_{1,2}^2=0.97$). Depending on their phase at merger, this family leads to $simpm4,700$ km/s and all intermediate values of the recoil along the orbital angular momentum of the binary system. We introduce a new invariant method to evaluate the recoil dependence on the merger phase via the waveform peak amplitude used as a reference phase angle and compare it with previous definitions. We also compute the mismatch between these hangup-kick waveforms to infer their observable differentiability by gravitational wave detectors, such as advanced LIGO, finding currently reachable signal-to-noise ratios, hence allowing for the identification of highly recoiling black holes having otherwise essentially the same binary parameters.
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