Related papers: Massive black hole binary inspiral and spin evolut…
Pulsar timing arrays have recently found evidence for nanohertz gravitational waves that are consistent with being produced by a cosmological population of binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs). However, the amplitude of this…
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…
We perform magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accreting, equal-mass binary black holes in full general relativity focusing on the impact of black hole spin on the dynamical formation and evolution of minidisks. We find that during the late…
Angular momentum transport in high-mass stars is commonly modeled by extrapolating the behavior of better-observed low-mass stars. According to the conventional picture, the cores of most black hole progenitors lose almost all of their…
Binary black holes on quasicircular orbits with spins aligned with their orbital angular momentum have been testbeds for analytic and numerical relativity for decades, not least because symmetry ensures that such configurations are…
The spin-orbit misalignment of stellar-mass black hole (sBH) binaries provide important constraints on the formation channels of merging sBHs. Here, we study the role of secular spin-orbit resonance in the evolution of a sBH binary…
The astrophysical origin of gravitational wave (GW) events is one of the most timely problems in the wake of the LIGO/Virgo discoveries. In active galactic nuclei (AGN), binaries form and evolve efficiently by dynamical interactions and…
Recent studies have shown that AGN discs can host sources of gravitational waves. Compact binaries can form and merge in AGN discs through their interactions with the gas and other compact objects in the disc. It is also possible for the…
We report the first results from evolutions of a generic black-hole binary, i.e. a binary containing unequal mass black holes with misaligned spins. Our configuration, which has a mass ratio of 2:1, consists of an initially non-spinning…
We compute the isotropic gravitational wave (GW) background produced by binary supermassive black holes (SBHs) in galactic nuclei. In our model, massive binaries evolve at early times via gravitational-slingshot interaction with nearby…
In this letter we study the eccentricity evolution of a massive black hole (MBH) binary (MBHB) embedded in a rotating stellar cusp. Following the observation that stars on counter-rotating (with respect to the MBHB) orbits extract angular…
We present results from a new code for binary black hole evolutions using the moving-puncture approach, implementing finite differences in generalised coordinates, and allowing the spacetime to be covered with multiple communicating…
We study the formation of coalescing binary black holes via the evolution of isolated field binaries that go through the common envelope phase in order to obtain the combined distributions of the main observables of Advanced LIGO. We used a…
Motivated by observational searches for massive black hole (MBH) pairs at kiloparsec separations we develop a semi-analytic model to describe their orbital evolution under the influence of stellar and gaseous dynamical friction (DF). The…
We investigate the evolution of intermediate-mass (IMBHs), stellar (BHs) and binary black holes (BHBs), deposited near a supermassive black hole (SMBH) by a population of massive star clusters. Stellar BHs rapidly segregate around the SMBH,…
The spin of a newly formed black hole (BH) at the center of a massive star evolves from its natal value due to two competing processes: accretion of gas angular momentum that increases the spin, and extraction of BH angular momentum by…
In a recent paper we have shown that the evolution of a misaligned disc around a spinning black hole can result in tearing the disc into many distinct planes. Tearing discs with random orientations produce direct dynamical accretion on to…
Recent work paints a conflicting portrait of the distribution of black hole spins in merging binaries measured with gravitational waves. Some analyses find that a significant fraction of merging binaries contain at least one black hole with…
Supermassive black hole (BH) mergers produce powerful gravitational wave (GW) emission. Asymmetry in this emission imparts a recoil kick to the merged BH, which can eject the BH from its host galaxy altogether. Recoiling BHs could be…
The spin distribution of massive black holes (MBHs) contains rich information on their assembly history. However, only limited information can be extracted from currently available spin measurements of MBHs owing to the small sample size…