No Arabic abstract
Gravitational wave emission by coalescing black holes (BHs) kicks the remnant BH with a typical velocity of hundreds of km/s. This velocity is sufficiently large to remove the remnant BH from a low-mass galaxy but is below the escape velocity from the Milky Way (MW) galaxy. If central BHs were common in the galactic building blocks that merged to make the MW, then numerous BHs that were kicked out of low-mass galaxies should be freely floating in the MW halo today. We use a large statistical sample of possible merger tree histories for the MW to estimate the expected number of recoiled BH remnants present in the MW halo today. We find that hundreds of BHs should remain bound to the MW halo after leaving their parent low-mass galaxies. Each BH carries a compact cluster of old stars that populated the core of its original host galaxy. Using the time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation, we find that present-day clusters are ~< 1 pc in size, and their central bright regions should be unresolved in most existing sky surveys. These compact systems are distinguishable from globular clusters by their internal (Keplerian) velocity dispersion greater than one hundred km/s and their high mass-to-light ratio owing to the central BH. An observational discovery of this relic population of star clusters in the MW halo, would constrain the formation history of the MW and the dynamics of BH mergers in the early Universe. A similar population should exist around other galaxies, and may potentially be detectable in M31 and M33.
We present evidence for a ring of stars in the plane of the Milky Way, extending at least from l = 180 deg to l = 227 deg with turnoff magnitude $g sim 19.5$; the ring could encircle the Galaxy. We infer that the low Galactic latitude structure is at a fairly constant distance of R = 18 +/- 2 kpc from the Galactic Center above the Galactic plane, and has R = 20 +/- 2 kpc in the region sampled below the Galactic plane. The evidence includes five hundred SDSS spectroscopic radial velocities of stars within 30 degrees of the plane. The velocity dispersion of the stars associated with this structure is found to be 27 km/s at (l,b) = (198, -27), 22 km/s at (l,b) = (225, 28), 30 km/s at (l,b) = (188, 24), and 30 km/s at (l,b) = (182, 27) degrees. The structure rotates in the same prograde direction as the Galactic disk stars, but with a circular velocity of 110+/-25 km/s. The narrow measured velocity dispersion is inconsistent with power law spheroid or thick disk populations. We compare the velocity dispersion in this structure with the velocity dispersion of stars in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy tidal stream, for which we measure a velocity dispersion of 20 km/s at (l, b) = (165, -55) deg. We estimate a preliminary metallicity from the Ca II (K) line and color of the turnoff stars of [Fe/H] = -1.6 with a dispersion of 0.3 dex and note that the turnoff color is consistent with that of the spheroid population. We interpret our measurements as evidence for a tidally disrupted satellite of $2 times 10^7$ to $5 times 10^8 rm M_odot$ which rings the Galaxy.
We present an open-access database which includes a synthetic catalog of black holes in the Milky Way. To calculate evolution of single and binary stars we used updated population synthesis code StarTrack. We applied a new model of star formation history and chemical evolution of Galactic disk, bulge and halo synthesized from observational and theoretical data. We find that at the current moment Milky Way (disk+bulge+halo) contains about 1.2 x 10^8 single black holes with average mass of about 14 Msun and 9.3 x 10^6 BHs in binary systems with average mass of 19 Msun. We present basic statistical properties of BH populations such as distributions of single and binary BH masses, velocities, orbital parameters or numbers of BH binary systems in different evolutionary configurations. We find that the most massive BHs are formed in mergers of binary systems, such as BH-MS, BH+He, BH-BH. The metallicity of stellar population has a significant impact on the final BH mass due to the stellar winds. Therefore the most massive single BH in our simulation, 113 Msun, originates from a merger of a helium star and a black hole in a low metallicity stellar environment in Galactic halo. The most massive BH in binary system is 60 Msun and was also formed in Galactic halo. We constrain that only 0.006% of total Galactic halo mass (including dark matter) could be hidden in the form of stellar origin BHs which are not detectable by current observational surveys. Galactic binary BHs are minority (10% of all Galactic BHs) and most of them are in BH-BH systems. The current Galactic merger rates for two considered common envelope models which are: 3-81 Myr^-1 for BH-BH, 1-9 Myr^-1, for BH-NS and 14-59 Myr^-1 for NS-NS systems. Data files are available at https://bhc.syntheticuniverse.org/.
As massive black holes (MBHs) grow from lower-mass seeds, it is natural to expect that a leftover population of progenitor MBHs should also exist in the present universe. Dwarf galaxies undergo a quiet merger history, and as a result, we expect that dwarfs observed in the local Universe retain some `memory of the original seed mass distribution. Consequently, the properties of MBHs in nearby dwarf galaxies may provide clean indicators of the efficiency of MBH formation. In order to examine the properties of MBHs in dwarf galaxies, we evolve different MBH populations within a Milky Way halo from high-redshift to today. We consider two plausible MBH formation mechanisms: `massive seeds formed via gas-dynamical instabilities and a Population III remnant seed model. `Massive seeds have larger masses than PopIII remnants, but form in rarer hosts. We dynamically evolve all halos merging with the central system, taking into consideration how the interaction modifies the satellites, stripping their outer mass layers. We compute different properties of the MBH population hosted in these satellites. We find that for the most part MBHs retain the original mass, thus providing a clear indication of what the properties of the seeds were. We derive the black hole occupation fraction (BHOF) of the satellite population at z=0. MBHs generated as `massive seeds have large masses that would favour their identification, but their typical BHOF is always below 40 per cent and decreases to less than per cent for observed dwarf galaxy sizes. In contrast, Population III remnants have a higher BHOF, but their masses have not grown much since formation, inhibiting their detection.
We determine the main properties of the Galactic binary black hole (BBH) population detectable by LISA and strategies to distinguish them from the much more numerous white dwarf binaries. We simulate BBH populations based on cosmological simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies and binary evolution models. We then determine their gravitational wave emission as observed by LISA and build mock catalogs. According to our model LISA will detect $approx4(6)$ binary black holes assuming 4(10) years of operations. Those figures grow to $approx6(9)$ when models are re-normalized to the inferred LIGO/Virgo merger rates. About 40%(70%) of the sources will have a good enough chirp mass measurement to separate them from the much lighter white dwarf and neutron star binaries. Most of the remaining sources should be identifiable by their lack of electromagnetic counterpart within $approx100$ pc. These results are robust with respect to the current uncertainties of the BBH merger rate as measured by LIGO/Virgo as well as the global mass spectrum of the binaries. We determine there is a 94 per cent chance that LISA finds at least one of these systems, which will allow us to pinpoint the conditions where they were formed and possibly find unique electromagnetic signatures.
We present a self-consistent prediction from a large-scale cosmological simulation for the population of `wandering supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of mass greater than $10^6$ M$_{odot}$ on long-lived, kpc-scale orbits within Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies. We extract a sample of MW-mass halos from the Romulus25 cosmological simulation (Tremmel et al. 2017), which is uniquely able to capture the orbital evolution of SMBHs during and following galaxy mergers. We predict that such halos, regardless of recent merger history or morphology, host an average of $5.1 pm 3.3$ SMBHs, including their central black hole, within 10 kpc from the galactic center and an average of $12.2 pm 8.4$ SMBHs total within their virial radius, not counting those in satellite halos. Wandering SMBHs exist within their host galaxies for several Gyrs, often accreted by their host halo in the early Universe. We find, with $>4sigma$ significance, that wandering SMBHs are preferentially found outside of galactic disks.