New research sheds light on the way black hole mergers are formed
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A new study is shedding light on the environments that could lead to black hole merger events.
This is according to a press release by the Royal Astronomical Society published on Monday.
“The first gravitational waves, predicted initially by Albert Einstein in 1916, were detected from Earth in 2015. However, determining their origin in the cosmos has been an open question. To be detectable across such vast distances, the gravitational waves we observe can only have come from pairs of large, highly dense objects in close proximity to each other, such as black holes or neutron star binaries,” noted the statement.
“There have now been over 90 such detections, though the primary astrophysical environment that allows these objects to get close enough to emit gravitational waves remains a mystery.”
Quasar speculation
The researchers speculate that one possible environment where black holes may undergo frequent mergers is in quasars. In the new research, the team of astronomers from the University of Oxford and Columbia University examined this theory and found that stellar-mass black holes could be dragged into dense quasar gas discs and forced into binary systems by gravitational interactions with each other and the gas in the discs.
They did this by performing high-resolution simulations of the gaseous disc of a quasar containing two stellar-mass black holes. These simulations used 25 million gas particles to imitate the complex gas flows during the encounter. They required a computational running time of around three months for each simulation. Their aim was to see if the black holes get captured into a gravitationally bound binary system and possibly merge at a later time within the gas disc.
“These simulations address two main questions: can gas catalyze black hole binary formation and if so, can they ultimately get even closer and merge? For this process to explain the origin of the observed gravitational wave signals, both answers need to be yes,” said research lead Connar Rowan.
“These results are incredibly exciting as they validate that black hole mergers in supermassive black hole discs can happen, and possibly explain many or perhaps most of the gravitational wave signals we observe today,” said Professor Bence Kocsis, co-author of the research paper.
“If a sizeable fraction of the observed events, either today or in the future, is caused by this phenomenon, we should be able to see a direct association between quasars and gravitational wave sources in the sky,” added in the statement Professor Zoltán Haiman of Columbia University, another co-author of the research paper.
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