No Arabic abstract
We follow trajectories of recoiling supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in analytical and numerical models of galaxy merger remnants with masses of $10^{11} rm{M_{sun}}$ and $10^{12} rm{M_{sun}}$. We construct various merger remnant galaxies in order to investigate how the central SMBH mass and the mass ratio of progenitor galaxies influence escape velocities of recoiling SMBHs. Our results show that static analytical models of major merger remnant galaxies overestimate the SMBHs escape velocities. During major mergers violent relaxation leads to the decrease of galaxy mass and lower potential at large remnant radii. This process is not depicted in static analytical potential but clearly seen in our numerical models. Thus, the evolving numerical model is a more realistic description of dynamical processes in galaxies with merging SMBHs. We find that SMBH escape velocities in numerical major merger remnant galaxies can be up to 25 per cent lower compared to those in analytical models. Consequently, SMBHs in numerical models generally reach greater galactocentric distances and spend more time on bound orbits outside of the galactic nuclei. Thus, numerical models predict a greater number of spatially-offset active galactic nuclei (AGNs).
The coalescence of a binary black hole can be accompanied by a large gravitational recoil due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves. A recoiling supermassive black hole (SBH) can subsequently undergo long-lived oscillations in the potential well of its host galaxy, suggesting that offset SBHs may be common in the cores of massive ellipticals. We have analyzed HST archival images of 14 nearby core ellipticals, finding evidence for small ($lesssim 10$ pc) displacements between the AGN (locating the SBH) and the center of the galaxy (the mean photocenter) in 10 of them. Excluding objects that may be affected by large-scale isophotal asymmetries, we consider six galaxies to have detected displacements, including M87, where a displacement was previously reported by Batcheldor et al. 2010. In individual objects, these displacements can be attributed to residual gravitational recoil oscillations following a major or minor merger within the last few Gyr. For plausible merger rates, however, there is a high probability of larger displacements than those observed, if SBH coalescence took place in these galaxies. Remarkably, the AGN-photocenter displacements are approximately aligned with the radio source axis in four of the six galaxies with displacements, including three of the four having relatively powerful kpc-scale jets. This suggests intrinsic asymmetries in radio jet power as a possible displacement mechanism, although approximate alignments are also expected for gravitational recoil. Orbital motion in SBH binaries and interactions with massive perturbers can produce the observed displacement amplitudes but do not offer a ready explanation for the alignments.
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.
[ABRIDGED] We have carried out a systematic search for close supermassive black hole binaries among z < 0.7 SDSS quasars Such binaries are predicted by models of supermassive black hole and host galaxy co-evolution, therefore their census and population properties constitute an important test of these models. We used an automatic technique based on spectroscopic principal component analysis to search for broad H-beta lines that are displaced from the rest-frame of the quasar by more than 1,000 km/s This method can also yield candidates for rapidly recoiling black holes. Our search yielded 88 candidates, several of which were previously identified and discussed in the literature. The widths of the broad H-beta lines are typical among quasars but the shifts are extreme. We found a correlation between the peak offset and skewness of the broad H-beta profiles, which suggests that the profiles we have selected share a common physical explanation. The general properties of the narrow emission lines are typical of quasars. We carried out followup spectroscopic observations of 68 objects to search for changes in the peak velocities of the H-beta lines (the time interval in the observers frame between the original and new observations is 1-10 yr). We measured significant changes in 14 objects, with resulting accelerations between -120 and +120 km/s/yr. We emphasize that interpretation of the offset broad emission lines as signatures of supermassive binaries is subject to many significant caveats. Many more followup observations over a long temporal baseline are needed to characterize the variability pattern of the broad lines and test that this pattern is indeed consistent with orbital motion. The possibility that some of the objects in this sample are rapidly recoiling black holes remains open as the available data do not provide strong constraints for this scenario.
We investigate the dynamics of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic cores by means of a semi-analytic model based on the Langevin equation, including dynamical friction and stochastic noise accounting for the gravitational interactions with stars. The model is validated against direct $N$-body simulations of intermediate-mass black holes in stellar clusters where a realistic number of particles is accessible. For the galactic case, we find that the SMBH experiences a Brownian-like motion with a typical displacement from the geometric center of the Galaxy of a few parsecs, for system parameters compatible with M87. keywords{stellar dynamics, black hole physics, methods: n-body simulations, methods: statistical.
Recent general relativistic simulations have shown that the coalescence of two spinning black holes (BH) can lead to recoiling speeds of the BH remnant of up to thousands of km/s as a result of the gravitational radiation emission. It is important that the accretion disc remains bound to ejected BH within the region where the gas orbital velocity is larger than the ejection speed. We considered the situation when the recoiling kick radius coincides with the radius of the broad line region (BLR). We show that in this situation the observed polarization data of accretion disk emission allow to determine the value of the recoil velocity. We present the estimates of the kick velocity for AGN with determined polarization data.