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Related papers: High-Spin BBH Subpopulation from AGN Accretion

200 papers

We present general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of merging equal-mass, spinning black holes embedded in an equatorial thin slab of magnetized gas. We evolve black holes either non-spinning, with spins aligned to the orbital…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-05-31 Giacomo Fedrigo , Federico Cattorini , Bruno Giacomazzo , Monica Colpi

With the release of the fourth LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA gravitational-wave catalog (GWTC-4), we are starting to gain a detailed view of the population of merging binary black holes. The formation channels of these black holes is not clearly…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-22 Sharan Banagiri , Eric Thrane , Paul D. Lasky

Recently, advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) has detected black hole (BH) merger events, most of which are sourced by BHs more massive than $30~M_\odot$. Especially, the observation of GW170104 suggests…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-04-11 Hiromichi Tagawa , Masayuki Umemura

Despite the increasing number of Gravitational Wave (GW) detections, the astrophysical origin of Binary Black Hole (BBH) mergers remains elusive. A promising formation channel for BBHs is inside accretion discs around supermassive black…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-10-25 Niccolò Veronesi , Elena Maria Rossi , Sjoert van Velzen

We perform a statistical inference of the astrophysical population of binary black hole (BBH) mergers observed during the first two observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, including events reported in the GWTC-1 and IAS…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-12-22 Javier Roulet , Tejaswi Venumadhav , Barak Zackay , Liang Dai , Matias Zaldarriaga

Accretion is thought to primarily contribute to the mass accumulation history of supermassive black holes throughout cosmic time. While this may be true at high redshifts, at lower redshifts and for the most massive black holes mergers…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-26 Andrea Kulier , Jeremiah P. Ostriker , Priyamvada Natarajan , Claire N. Lackner , Renyue Cen

In this work, we use general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations to explore the effect of spin orientation on the dynamics of gas in the vicinity of merging black holes. We present a suite of eight simulations of unequal-mass,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-09-13 Federico Cattorini , Bruno Giacomazzo , Monica Colpi , Francesco Haardt

Black holes across a broad range of masses play a key role in the evolution of galaxies. The initial seeds of black holes formed at $z \sim 30$ and grew over cosmic time by gas accretion and mergers. Using observational data for quasars and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-06-03 Fabio Pacucci , Abraham Loeb

Massive black hole (MBH) binary inspiral time scales are uncertain, and their spins are even more poorly constrained. Spin misalignment, along with unequal mass ratios and spin magnitudes, introduces asymmetry in the gravitational…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-05-21 Mohammad Sayeb , Laura Blecha , Luke Zoltan Kelley , Davide Gerosa , Michael Kesden , July Thomas

We use a combination of a cosmological N-body simulation of the concordance Lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) paradigm and a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to investigate the spin development of central supermassive black holes (BHs)…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Claudia del P. Lagos , Nelson D. Padilla , Sofia A. Cora

There is much debate about the channels for astrophysical origins of the stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo. Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are promising sites for the efficient formation and rapid…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-04-30 Guo-Peng Li

The relation between the mass and spin of stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) has been proposed to be a smoking gun for the presence of multiple formation channels for compact objects. First-generation black holes (BHs) formed by…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-12-04 Grégoire Pierra , Simone Mastrogiovanni , Stéphane Perriès

The masses, rates, and spins of merging stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) detected by aLIGO and Virgo provide challenges to traditional BBH formation and merger scenarios. An active galactic nucleus (AGN) disk provides a promising…

The dense and dynamic environments within active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks may serve as prolific birthplaces for binary black holes (BBHs) and one possible origin for some of the BBHs detected by gravitational-wave (GW)…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-10-31 Samson H. W. Leong , Justin Janquart , Aditya Kumar Sharma , Paul Martens , Parameswaran Ajith , Otto A. Hannuksela

Merging black holes (BH) are expected to produce remnants with large dimensionless spin parameters ($a_{\rm spin} \sim 0.7$). However, gravitational wave (GW) observations with LIGO/Virgo suggest that merging BH are consistent with modestly…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-09-28 B. McKernan , K. E. S. Ford

Accretion disks around supermassive black holes are promising sites for stellar mass black hole mergers detectable with LIGO. Here we present the results of Monte-Carlo simulations of black hole mergers within 1-d AGN disk models. For the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-04-08 B. McKernan , K. E. S. Ford , R. O'Shaughnessy , D. Wysocki

The observation of gravitational-wave signals from merging black-hole binaries enables direct measurement of the properties of the black holes. An individual observation allows measurement of the black-hole masses, but only limited…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2018-12-12 Vaibhav Tiwari , Stephen Fairhurst , Mark Hannam

Gravitational-wave observations of massive, rapidly spinning binary black holes mergers provide increasing evidence for the dynamical origin of some mergers. Previous studies have interpreted the mergers with primary mass…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-11-10 Hui Tong , Thomas A. Callister , Maya Fishbach , Eric Thrane , Fabio Antonini , Simon Stevenson , Isobel M. Romero-Shaw , Fani Dosopoulou

The disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) provide a natural environment where stellar-mass black holes (BHs) can dynamically pair, undergo repeated interactions, and eventually merge. It is commonly assumed that gas accretion will both…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-03-25 Gaia Fabj , Christopher Tiede , Connar Rowan , Martin Pessah , Johan Samsing

We use the gravitational wave signals from binary black hole merger events observed by LIGO and Virgo to reconstruct the underlying mass and spin distributions of the population of merging black holes. We reconstruct the population using…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-05-27 Vaibhav Tiwari , Stephen Fairhurst