Although their existence is not yet confirmed observationally, intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) may play a key role in the dynamics of galactic nuclei. In this paper, we neglect the effect of the nuclear star cluster itself and investigate only how a small reservoir of IMBHs influences the secular dynamics of stellar-mass black hole binaries, using N-body simulations. We show that our simplifications are valid and that the IMBHs significantly enhance binary evaporation by pushing the binaries into the Hill-unstable region of parameter space, where they are separated by the SMBH's tidal field. For binaries in the S-cluster region of the Milky Way, IMBHs drive the binaries to merge in up to 1-6% of cases, assuming five IMBHs within 5 pc of mass 10,000 solar masses each. Observations of binaries in the Galactic center may strongly constrain the population of IMBHs therein.
@article{arxiv.1909.04678,
title = {Intermediate mass black holes' effect on compact object binaries},
author = {Barnabás Deme and Yohai Meiron and Bence Kocsis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.04678},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in ApJ. 14 pages, 11 figures