Related papers: Electromagnetic Signatures from Supermassive Binar…
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…
Attempts to understand the formation of binary black hole (BBH) systems detected via gravitational wave (GW) emission are affected by many unknowns and uncertainties, from both the observational and theoretical (astrophysical modelling)…
We investigate whether a circumbinary gas disc can coalesce a supermassive black hole binary system in the centre of a galaxy. This is known to be problematic for a prograde disc. We show that in contrast, interaction with a retrograde…
We study the dynamics of merging compact binaries near a rotating supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a hierarchical triple configuration. We include various general relativistic effects that couple the inner orbit, the outer orbit and the…
Stellar mass black holes (SMBHs), forming by the core collapse of very massive, rapidly rotating stars, are expected to exhibit a high density accretion disk around them developed from the spinning mantle of the collapsing star. A wide…
Accreting supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) are potential multi-messenger sources because they emit both gravitational wave and electromagnetic (EM) radiation. Past work has shown that their EM output may be periodically modulated by…
The mergers of black hole (BH)--neutron star (NS) binaries have been one of the most interesting topics in astrophysics, because such events have been thought to possibly produce multimessenger signals including gravitational waves and…
Gravitational wave observations of eccentric binary black hole mergers will provide unequivocal evidence for the formation of these systems through dynamical assembly in dense stellar environments. The study of these astrophysically…
Based on a new estimation of their thickness, the global properties of relativistic slim accretion disks are investigated in this work. The resulting emergent spectra are calculated using the relativistic ray-tracing method, in which we…
We present an analytic model for computing the luminosity and spectral evolution of flares caused by a supermassive black hole impacting the accretion disc of another supermassive black hole. Our model includes photon diffusion, emission…
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…
Determining the final result of black hole-neutron star mergers, and in particular the amount of matter remaining outside the black hole at late times and its properties, has been one of the main motivations behind the numerical simulation…
The final merger of a pair of massive black holes in a galactic nucleus is compelled by gravitational radiation. Gravitational waves from the mergers of black holes of masses (10^5-10^7)(1+z)^{-1} Msun at redshifts of 1-20 will be readily…
The interaction of binary black hole mergers with their environments can be studied using numerical relativity simulations. These start only a short finite time before merger, at which point appropriate initial conditions must be imposed. A…
Black holes of mass M must have a spin angular momentum S below the Kerr limit chi = S/M^2 < 1, but whether astrophysical black holes can attain this limiting spin depends on their accretion history. Gas accretion from a thin disk limits…
Recent hydrodynamical simulations have shown that circumbinary gas disks drive the orbits of binary black holes to become eccentric, even when general relativistic corrections to the orbit are significant. Here, we study the general…
We show that gas disks around the components of an orbiting binary system (so-called minidisks) may be susceptible to a resonant instability which causes the minidisks to become significantly eccentric. Eccentricity is injected by, and also…
We introduce a method to quantify the initial eccentricity, gravitational wave frequency, and mean anomaly of numerical relativity simulations that describe non-spinning black holes on moderately eccentric orbits. We demonstrate that this…
Binary black hole mergers are among the most violent events in the Universe, leading to extreme warping of spacetime and copious emission of gravitational radiation. Even though black holes are the most compact objects they are not…
The spins of binary black holes measured with gravitational waves provide insights about the formation, evolution, and dynamics of these systems. However, interpreting these measurements-especially for heavy black holes-remains an open…