Related papers: Binary Black Hole Encounters, Gravitational Bursts…

Interactions between a supermassive black hole binary and the surrounding accretion disc can both assist the binary inspiral and align the black hole spins to the disc angular momentum. While binary migration is due to angular-momentum…

[ABRIDGED] We study supermassive black hole binary mergers driven by angular momentum loss to small-scale gas discs. Such binaries form after major galaxy mergers, but their fate is unclear since hardening through stellar scattering becomes…

A circumbinary disc around a pair of merging stellar-mass black holes may be shocked and heated during the recoil of the merged hole, causing a near-simultaneous electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave event. The shocks occur…

When two relativistically boosted, nonspinning black holes pass by one another on a scattering trajectory, we might expect the tidal interaction to spin up each black hole. We present the first exploration of this effect, appearing at…

Over the last few years enormous progress has been made in the numerical description of the inspiral and merger of binary black holes. A particular effort has gone into the modelling of the physical properties of the final black hole,…

The possible formation mechanisms of massive close binary black holes (BHs) that can merge in the Hubble time to produce powerful gravitational wave bursts detected during advanced LIGO O1 and O2 science runs include the evolution from…

The tidal acceleration experienced by an object at the event horizon of a black hole decreases as one over the square of the black hole's mass. As such there is a maximum mass at which a black hole can tidally disrupt an object outside of…

Understanding the fate of merging supermassive black holes in galactic mergers, and the gravitational wave emission from this process, are important LISA science goals. To this end, we present results from numerical relativity simulations…

We measure the recoil velocity as a function of spin for equal-mass, highly-spinning black-hole binaries, with spins in the orbital plane, equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. We confirm that the leading-order effect is linear in…

General relativity (GR) predicts the existence of black hole (BH). The rotating BH called as a Kerr Black hole and GR implies that there is an upper limit on the angular momentum per mass squared of black holes $\leq 1$, above which the…

We prove that merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) typically have neither equal masses, nor is their mass ratio too extreme. The majority of such mergers fall into the mass ratio range of 1:30 to 1:3, implying a spin flip during the…

We study gravitational wave emission, zoom-whirl behavior and the resulting spin of the remnant black hole in highly boosted collisions of equal-mass, non spinning black-hole binaries with generic impact parameter.

In a recent paper arXiv:0709.0299, we introduced a spin expansion that provides a simple yet powerful way to understand aspects of binary black hole (BBH) merger. This approach relies on the symmetry properties of initial and final…

To date, there have been several detections of high-mass black hole binaries in both the Milky Way and other galaxies. For some of these, the spin parameter of the black hole has been estimated. As many of these systems are quite tight, a…

Using high resolution hydrodynamical simulations, we explore the spin evolution of massive dual black holes orbiting inside a circumnuclear disc, relic of a gas-rich galaxy merger. The black holes spiral inwards from initially eccentric co…

Characterizing the properties of black holes is one of the most important science objectives for gravitational-wave observations. Astrophysical evidence suggests that black holes that are nearly extremal (i.e. spins near the theoretical…

Using inspiral and plunge trajectories we construct with a generalized Ori-Thorne algorithm, we use a time-domain black hole perturbation theory code to compute the corresponding gravitational waves. The last cycles of these waveforms are a…

Recent calculations of the recoil velocity in binary black hole mergers have found the kick velocity to be of the order of a few hundred km/s in the case of non-spinning binaries and about $500 $km/s in the case of spinning configurations,…

The rotational properties of astrophysical black holes are fundamental quantities that characterization the black holes. A new method to empirically determine the spin mass-energy characteristics of astrophysical black holes is presented…

We present the results of 14 simulations of nonspinning black hole binaries with mass ratios $q=m_1/m_2$ in the range $1/100\leq q\leq1$. For each of these simulations we perform three runs at increasing resolution to assess the finite…