Related papers: Cusp Formation in Merging Black Hole Horizons
In contrast to energy and angular momentum, electric charge is conserved in mergers of charged black holes. This opens up the possibility for the remnant to have Kerr-Newman parameter $\chi^{2} + \lambda^{2}$ greater than 1 (with $\chi$ and…
The final state of a binary black hole merger is predicted with high precision by numerical relativity, but could there be a simple thermodynamic principle within general relativity that governs the selection of the remnant? Using…
Dense stellar environments like nuclear star clusters (NSCs) can dynamically assemble gravitational wave (GW) sources. We consider a population of single stellar mass black holes (BHs) in the inner $0.1$~pc of a NSC surrounding a $4 \times…
The heaviest black holes discovered through gravitational waves have masses that are difficult to explain with current standard stellar models. This discrepancy may be due to a series of hierarchical mergers, where the observed black holes…
We present the results of N-body simulations of the accretion of high-density dwarf galaxies by low-density giant galaxies. Both galaxies contain power-law central density cusps and point masses representing supermassive black holes; the…
Recent detections of gravitational waves from mergers of binary black holes (BBHs) with pre-merger source-frame individual masses in the so-called upper mass-gap, expected due to (pulsational) pair instability supernova ((P)PISN), have…
There is a high level of interest in black hole-neutron star binaries, not only because their mergers may be detected by gravitational wave observatories in the coming years, but also because of the possibility that they could explain a…
We investigate the consequences of a model of the assembly and growth of massive black holes from primordial seeds, remnants of the first generation of stars in a hierarchical structure formation scenario. Our model traces the build-up of…
Major galaxy mergers are thought to play an important part in fuelling the growth of supermassive black holes. However, observational support for this hypothesis is mixed, with some studies showing a correlation between merging galaxies and…
In this paper, we explore the mechanisms that regulate the formation and evolution of stellar black hole binaries (BHBs) around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We show that dynamical interactions can efficiently drive "in-situ" BHB…
Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the…
Evidence has been mounting for the existence of black holes with masses from 10^2 to 10^4 M_Solar associated with stellar clusters. Such intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) will encounter other black holes in the dense cores of these…
We present a simple, general, and accurate construction of the event horizons for the fusion of two neutral, rotating black holes with arbitrary orientation and values of their spins, in the extreme mass ratio limit where one black hole is…
We make use of the first high--resolution hydrodynamic simulations of structure formation which self-consistently follows the build up of supermassive black holes introduced in Di Matteo et al. (2007) to investigate the relation between…
GW231123, the most massive binary black hole (BBH) merger detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, highlights the need to understand the origins of massive, high-spin stellar black holes (BHs). Dense star clusters provide natural environments for…
We report evidence for nonlinear modes in the ringdown stage of the gravitational waveform produced by the merger of two comparable-mass black holes. We consider both the coalescence of black hole binaries in quasicircular orbits and…
We present theoretical models of black hole (BH) populations in young stellar environments, such as starbursts and young star clusters. Using a population synthesis approach we compute the formation rates and characteristic properties of…
Two of the dominant channels to produce the black-hole binary mergers observed by LIGO and Virgo are believed to be the isolated evolution of stellar binaries in the field and dynamical formation in star clusters. Their relative efficiency…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous in galaxies with a sizable mass. It is expected that a pair of SMBHs originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies would form a binary and eventually coalesce via a burst of gravitational…
The black holes that have been detected via gravitational waves (GW) can have either astrophysical or primordial origin. Some GW events show significant spin for one of the components and have been assumed to be astrophysical, since…