Related papers: Retrograde Accretion and Merging Supermassive Blac…
Supermassive black hole binaries are likely to accrete interstellar gas through a circumbinary disk. Shortly before merger, the inner portions of this circumbinary disk are subject to general relativistic effects. To study this regime, we…
Recent studies of accretion onto supermassive black hole binaries suggest that much, perhaps most, of the matter eventually accretes onto one hole or the other. If so, then for binaries whose inspiral from ~1 pc to 0.001 - 0.01 pc is driven…
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…
[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…
We study the basic properties of accretion flows onto binary supermassive black holes, including the cases in which a circumbinary disk is misaligned with the binary orbital plane, by means of three-dimensional Smoothed Particle…
We explore the hardening of a massive black hole binary embedded in a circum-binary gas disc when the binary and the gas are coplanar and the gas is counter-rotating. The secondary black hole, revolving in the direction opposite to the gas,…
In general, when gas accretes on to a supermassive black hole binary it is likely to have no prior knowledge of the binary angular momentum. Therefore a circumbinary disc forms with a random inclination angle, theta, to the binary. It is…
We study the interplay between mass transfer, accretion and gravitational torques onto a black hole binary migrating in a self-gravitating, retrograde circumbinary disc. A direct comparison with an identical prograde disc shows that: (i)…
We compute the effect of an orbiting gas disc in promoting the coalescence of a central supermassive black hole binary. Unlike earlier studies, we consider a finite mass of gas with explicit time dependence: we do not assume that the gas…
We consider the evolution of a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) surrounded by a retrograde accretion disk. Assuming the disk is exactly in the binary plane and transfers energy and angular momentum to the binary via direct gas…
Recent simulations show that the eccentricity of supermassive binary black hole with intermediate mass ratio could grow toward near unity through gravitational interaction with the stellar background in the merging remnant after two…
We study the accretion flows from the circumbinary disks onto the supermassive binary black holes in a subparsec scale of the galactic center, using a smoothed particles hydrodynamics (SPH) code. Simulation models are presented in four…
With hydrodynamical simulations we examine the evolution of a highly misaligned circumbinary disc around a black hole binary including the effects of general relativity. We show that a disc mass of just a few percent of the binary mass can…
We present the results of high-resolution numerical simulations of gas clouds falling onto binary supermassive black holes to form circumbinary accretion discs, with both prograde and retrograde cloud orbits. We explore a range of clouds…
In this Letter we revisit arguments suggesting that the Bardeen-Petterson effect can coalign the spins of a central supermassive black hole binary accreting from a circumbinary (or circumnuclear) gas disc. We improve on previous estimates…
Using a one-dimensional height integrated model, we calculate the evolution of an unequal mass binary black hole with a coplanar gas disk that contains a gap due to the presence of the secondary black hole. Viscous evolution of the outer…
The merger process of a binary black hole system can have a strong impact on a circumbinary disk. In the present work we study the effect of both central mass reduction (due to the energy loss through gravitational waves) and a possible…
Massive binary black holes form at the centre of galaxies that experience a merger episode. They are expected to coalesce into a larger black hole, following the emission of gravitational waves. Coalescing massive binary black holes are…
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…
Understanding the interaction of massive black hole binaries with their gaseous environment is crucial since at sub-parsec scales the binary is too wide for gravitational wave emission to take over and to drive the two black holes to merge.…