Electromagnetic Signatures of Recoiling Black Holes

Abstract

AbstractRecent numerical relativity simulations predict that coalescing supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can receive kick velocities up to several thousands of kilometers per second due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves, leading to long-lived oscillations of the SMBHs in galaxy cores and even SMBH ejections from their host galaxies. Observationally, accreting recoiling SMBHs would appear as quasars spatially and/or kinematically offset from their host galaxies. The presence of these “kicks” and “superkicks” has a wide range of exciting astrophysical implications which only now are beginning to be explored, including consequences for black hole and galaxy growth at the epoch of structure formation, modes of feedback, unified models of AGN, and the number of obscured AGN. SMBH recoil oscillations beyond the torus scale can be on the order of a quasar lifetime, thus potentially affecting a large fraction of the quasar population. We discuss how this might explain the long-standing puzzle of a deficiency of obscured type 2 quasars at high luminosities. Observational signatures of recoiling SMBHs are discussed and results from follow-up studies of the candidate recoiling SMBH SDSSJ0927+2943 are presented.