Related papers: Circumbinary Disk Accretion into Spinning Black Ho…
Tidal torques acting on a gaseous accretion disk around a binary black hole can create a gap in the disk near the orbital radius. At late times, when the binary inspiral timescale due to gravitational wave emission becomes shorter than the…
We present the results of 2D, moving-mesh, viscous hydrodynamical simulations of an accretion disc around a merging supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB). The simulation is pseudo-Newtonian, with the BHs modeled as point masses with a…
Numerical-relativity simulations indicate that the black hole produced in a binary merger can recoil with a velocity up to v_max ~ 4,000 km/s with respect to the center of mass of the initial binary. This challenges the paradigm that most…
We investigate the impact of radiation pressure on the circumbinary discs surrounding accreting massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) at milli-parsec separations, using 3D hyper-Lagrangian resolution hydrodynamic simulations. The circumbinary…
Comparable-mass black-hole mergers generically result in moderate to highly spinning holes, whose spacetime curvature will significantly affect nearby matter in observable ways. We investigate how the moderate spin of a post-merger Kerr…
Circumbinary accretion disks have been examined, theoretically, for supermassive and intermediate mass black holes, however, disks for black hole masses in the LIGO regime are poorly understood. Assuming these binaries possess such a disk…
The shrinking of a binary orbit driven by the interaction with a gaseous circumbinary disc, initially advocated as a potential way to catalyze the binary merger, has been recently debated in the case of geometrically thick (i.e. with…
We study the expected distribution of massive black hole (MBH) spins and its evolution with cosmic time in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation theories. Our model uses Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM…
The gravitational wave signature of a binary black hole (BBH) merger is dependent on its component mass and spin. If such black holes originate from rapidly rotating progenitors, the large angular momentum reserve in the star could drive a…
We present a study of the gas-driven orbital evolution of unequal mass black hole binaries with circumbinary gas disks (CBDs), varying Mach number and viscosity (nu). Using two-dimensional grid-based hydrodynamics simulations spanning a…
In extreme/intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals (E/IMRIs) embedded in dark-matter (DM) spikes, the secondary black hole can accrete collisionless particles from the surrounding halo. We study how the companion's spin controls this process, and…
Using SPH numerical simulations, we investigate the effects of gas on the inspiral and merger of a massive black hole binary. This study is motivated by the very massive nuclear gas disks observed in the central regions of merging galaxies.…
There is compelling evidence that most -if not all- galaxies harbour a super-massive black hole (SMBH) at their nucleus, hence binaries of these massive objects are an inevitable product of the hierarchical evolution of structures in the…
A typical galaxy is thought to contain tens of millions of stellar-mass black holes, the collapsed remnants of once massive stars, and a single nuclear supermassive black hole. Both classes of black holes accrete gas from their…
We perform general relativistic simulations of self-gravitating black hole-disks in which the spin of the black hole is significantly tilted ($45^\circ$ and $90^\circ$) with respect to the angular momentum of the disk and the disk-to-black…
Numerical experiments are the primary method of studying the evolution of circumbinary disks due to the strong nonlinearities involved. Many circumbinary simulations also require the use of numerical mass sinks: source terms which prevent…
We model the overall shape of an accretion disc in a semi-detached binary system in which mass is transfered on to a spinning black hole the spin axis of which is misaligned with the orbital rotation axis. We assume the disc is in a steady…
We present the first fully-nonlinear numerical study of the dynamics of highly spinning black-hole binaries. We evolve binaries from quasicircular orbits (as inferred from Post-Newtonian theory), and find that the last stages of the orbital…
The spin measurement of black holes has important implications in physics and astrophysics. Regardless of the specific technique to estimate the black hole spin, all the current approaches assume that the space-time geometry around the…
We study the spin dynamics of individual black holes in a binary system. In particular we focus on the polar precession of spins and the possibility of a complete flip of spins with respect to the orbital plane. We perform a full numerical…