The merger of spinning, accreting supermassive black hole binaries

Abstract

Because they are likely to accrete substantial amounts of interstellar gas, merging supermassive binary black holes are expected to be strong multimessenger sources, radiating gravitational waves, photons from thermal gas, and photons from relativistic electrons energized by relativistic jets. Here we report on a numerical simulation that covers the late inspiral, merger, and initial postmerger phase of such a system where both black holes have the same mass and spin, and both spin axes are parallel to the orbital angular momentum. The simulation incorporates both 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics and numerical relativity. The thermal photon power during the late inspiral, merger, and immediate postmerger phases is drawn from strong shocks rather than dissipation of turbulence inside a smoothly structured accretion disk as typically found around accreting single black holes. We find that the thermal photon and jet Poynting flux outputs are closely related in time, and we posit a mechanism that enforces this relation. The power radiated in both photons and jets diminishes gradually as merger is approached, but jumps sharply at merger to a noisy plateau. Such a distinct lightcurve should aid efforts to identify supermassive black hole mergers, with or without accompanying gravitational wave detections.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Mass density on equatorial slices (top panels), magnitude of the Poynting vector and magnetic field-lines on vertical slices (middle panels), and photon emissivity on equatorial slices (bottom panels). Three times are shown for all quantities: early inspiral (left panels),shortly before merger (middle panels), and shortly after merger (right panels). At both pre-merger times, the black holes lie close to the $x$-axis.
• Figure 2: Mass within ${r\leq 15\,M}$ (top panel), total accretion rate onto the binary (second panel), photon luminosity within ${r\leq 15\,M}$ and ${r\leq 100\,M}$ (third panel), and Poynting flux in the jet regions at ${r=100\,M}$ (bottom panel).
• Figure 3: Ratio of ${L_\text{photons}}$ from ${r\leq 15\,M}$ (purple) or ${r\leq 100\,M}$ (yellow) to ${L_\text{Poynting}\left(r = 100\,M\right)}$. The averages for ${102500\,M\lesssim t\lesssim 110000\,M}$ are $0.164$ (photons from ${r\leq 15\,M}$) and $0.262$ (${r\leq 100\,M}$).