Gravitational Wave Heating of Stars and Accretion Disks
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
2015-06-04 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
We investigate the electromagnetic (EM) counterpart of gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) through the viscous dissipation of the GW energy in an accretion disk and stars surrounding the SMBHB. We account for the suppression of the heating rate if the forcing period is shorter than the turnover time of the largest turbulent eddies. We find that the viscous heating luminosity in 0.1 solar mass stars can be significantly higher than their intrinsic luminosity, but still too low to be detected for extragalactic sources. The relative brightening is small for accretion disks.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1203.0317,
title = {Gravitational Wave Heating of Stars and Accretion Disks},
author = {Gongjie Li and Bence Kocsis and Abraham Loeb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.0317},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, version accepted for publication in MNRAS