Black Hole Mergers Driven by a Captured Low-mass Companion

Abstract

Increased eccentricity of a black hole binary leads to reduced merger times. With n-body simulations and analytic approximations including the effects of general relativity (GR), we show that even a low-mass companion orbiting a black hole binary can cause significant eccentricity oscillations of the binary as a result of the Kozai–Lidov mechanism. A companion with a mass as low as about 1% of the binary mass can drive the binary eccentricity up to ≳0.8, while a mass of a few percent can drive eccentricities greater than 0.98. For low-mass companions, this mechanism requires the companion to be on an orbit that is closer to retrograde than to prograde to the binary orbit, and this may occur through capture of the third body. The effects of GR limit the radial range for the companion for which this mechanism works for the closest binaries. The merger timescale may be reduced by several orders of magnitude for a captured companion mass of only a few percent of the binary mass.