GW150914-like Black Holes as Galactic High-Energy Sources
Abstract
The first direct detections of gravitational waves (GWs) from black hole (BH) mergers, GW150914, GW151226 and LVT151012, give a robust lower limit on the number of merged, highly-spinning BHs in our Galaxy. The total spin energy is comparable to all the kinetic energy of supernovae that ever happened in our Galaxy. The BHs release the spin energy to relativistic jets by accreting matter and magnetic fields from the interstellar medium (ISM). By considering the distributions of the ISM density, BH mass and velocity, we calculate the luminosity function of the BH jets, and find that they can potentially accelerate TeV-PeV cosmic-ray particles in our Galaxy with total power erg s as PeVatrons, positron factories and/or unidentified TeV gamma-ray sources. Additional BH jet nebulae could be detectable by CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array). We also argue that the accretion from the ISM can evaporate and blow away cold material around the BH, which has profound implications for some scenarios to predict electromagnetic counterparts to BH mergers.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1612.03913,
title = {GW150914-like Black Holes as Galactic High-Energy Sources},
author = {Kunihito Ioka and Tatsuya Matsumoto and Yuto Teraki and Kazumi Kashiyama and Kohta Murase},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03913},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
15 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables