No Arabic abstract
The recent identification of a candidate very massive 70 M(Sun) black hole is at odds with our current understanding of stellar winds and pair-instability supernovae. We investigate alternate explanations for this system by searching the BPASS v2.2 stellar and population synthesis models for those that match the observed properties of the system. We find binary evolution models that match the LB-1 system, at the reported Gaia distance, with more moderate black hole masses of 4 to 7 M(Sun). We also examine the suggestion that the binary motion may have led to an incorrect distance determination by Gaia. We find that the Gaia distance is accurate and that the binary system is consistent with the observation at this distance. Consequently it is highly improbable that the black hole in this system has the extreme mass originally suggested. Instead, it is more likely to be representative of the typical black hole binary population expected in our Galaxy.
Using the Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis code BPASS, we have calculated the rates, timescales and mass distributions for binary black hole mergers as a function of metallicity. We consider these in the context of the recently reported 1st LIGO event detection. We find that the event has a very low probability of arising from a stellar population with initial metallicity mass fraction above Z=0.010 (Z>0.5Zsun). Binary black hole merger events with the reported masses are most likely in populations below 0.008 (Z<0.4Zsun). Events of this kind can occur at all stellar population ages from ~3 Myr up to the age of the universe, but constitute only 0.1 to 0.4 per cent of binary BH mergers between metallicities of Z=0.001 to 0.008. However at metallicity Z=0.0001, 26 per cent of binary BH mergers would be expected to have the reported masses. At this metallicity the progenitor merger times can be close to ~10Gyr and rotationally-mixed stars evolving through quasi-homogeneous evolution, due to mass transfer in a binary, dominate the rate. The masses inferred for the black holes in the binary progenitor of GW,150914 are amongst the most massive expected at anything but the lowest metallicities in our models. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the electromagnetic follow-up of future LIGO event detections.
At about 70 solar masses, the recently-discovered dark object orbited by a B-type star in the system LB-1 is difficult to understand as the end point of standard stellar evolution, except as a binary black hole (BBH). LB-1 shows a strong, broad H-alpha emission line that is best attributed to a gaseous disk surrounding the dark mass. We use the observed H-alpha line shape, particularly its wing extension, to constrain the inner radius of the disk and thereby the separation of a putative BBH. The hypothesis of a current BBH is effectively ruled out on the grounds that its merger time must be a small fraction of the current age of the B star. The hypothesis of a previous BBH that merged to create the current dark mass is also effectively ruled out by the low orbital eccentricity, due to the combination of mass loss and kick resulted from gravitational wave emission in any past merger. We conclude that the current dark mass is a single black hole produced by the highly mass-conserving, monolithic collapse of a massive star.
Recently, the Thakurta metric has been adopted as a model of primordial black holes by several authors. We show that the spacetime described by this metric has neither black-hole event horizon nor black-hole trapping horizon and involves the violation of the null energy condition as a solution of the Einstein equation. Therefore, this metric does not describe a cosmological black hole in the early universe.
We investigate properties of black hole (BH) binaries formed in globular clusters via dynamical processes, using direct N-body simulations. We pay attention to effects of BH mass function on the total mass and mass ratio distributions of BH binaries ejected from clusters. Firstly, we consider BH populations with two different masses in order to learn basic differences from models with single-mass BHs only. Secondly, we consider continuous BH mass functions adapted from recent studies on massive star evolution in a low metallicity environment, where globular clusters are formed. In this work, we consider only binaries that are formed by three-body processes and ignore stellar evolution and primordial binaries for simplicity. Our results imply that most BH binary mergers take place after they get ejected from the cluster. Also, mass ratios of dynamically formed binaries should be close to one or likely to be less than 2:1. Since the binary formation efficiency is larger for higher-mass BHs, it is likely that a BH mass function sampled by gravitational-wave observations would be weighed toward higher masses than the mass function of single BHs for a dynamically formed population. Applying conservative assumptions regarding globular cluster populations such as small BH mass fraction and no primordial binaries, the merger rate of BH binaries originated from globular clusters is estimated to be at least 6.5 per yr per Gpc^3. Actual rate can be up to more than several times of our conservative estimate.
HR 6819 was reported in Rivinius et al. (2020) to be a triple system with a non-accreting black hole (BH) in its inner binary. In our study we check if this inner binary can be reconstructed using the isolated binary formation channel or the dynamical one within globular star clusters. Our goals are to understand the formation of the inner binary and to test the presence of a non-accreting BH. To simulate the inner binary evolution we assumed that the influence of the third body on the formation of the inner binary is negligible. We tested various models with different values of physical parameters such as the mass loss rate during BH formation or the efficiency of orbital energy loss for common envelope ejection. By comparing the Roche lobe radii with the respective stellar radii no mass transfer event was shown to happen for more than 40 Myr after the BH collapse, suggesting that no accretion disk is supposed to form around the BH during the BH-MS phase. We can therefore reconstruct the system with isolated binaries, although in our simulations we had to adopt non-standard parameter values and to assume no asymmetric mass ejection during the black hole collapse. Out of the whole synthetic Galactic disk BH population only 0.0001% of the BH-MS binaries fall within the observational constraints. We expect only few binaries in the Galactic globular clusters to be potential candidates for the HR 6819 system. Our statistical analysis suggests that despite the HR 6819 inner binary can be reconstructed with isolated binary evolution, this evolutionary channel is unlikely to reproduce its reported parameters. Under the initial assumption that the outer star doesnt impact the evolution of its inner binary, we argue that the absence of a third body proposed by El-Badry & Quataert (2021) and Bodensteiner, J. et al. (2020) might be a more natural explanation for the given observational data.