Black Hole Binaries Research Articles

Searching for the Highest-z Dual Active Galactic Nuclei in the Deepest Chandra Surveys

We present an analysis searching for dual active galactic nuclei (AGN) among 62 high-redshift (2.5 < z < 3.5) X-ray sources selected from the X-UDS, AEGIS-XD, CDF-S, and COSMOS-Legacy Chandra surveys. We aim to quantify the frequency of dual AGN in the high-redshift Universe, which holds implications for black hole merger timescales and low-frequency gravitational wave detection rates. We analyze each X-ray source using BAYMAX, an analysis tool that calculates the Bayes factor for whether a given archival Chandra AGN is more likely a single or dual point source. We find no strong evidence for dual AGN in any individual source in our sample. We increase our sensitivity to search for dual AGN across the sample by comparing our measured distribution of Bayes factors to that expected from a sample composed entirely of single point sources and find no evidence for dual AGN in the sample distribution. Although our analysis utilizes one of the largest Chandra catalogs of high-z X-ray point sources available to study, the findings remain limited by the modest number of sources observed at the highest spatial resolution with Chandra and the typical count rates of the detected sources. Our nondetection allows us to place an upper limit on the X-ray dual AGN fraction at 2.5 < z < 3.5 of 4.8% at the 95% confidence level. Expanding substantially on these results at X-ray wavelengths will require future surveys spanning larger sky areas and extending to fainter fluxes than has been possible with Chandra. We illustrate the potential of the AXIS mission concept in this regard.

Standard siren cosmology with gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers in active galactic nuclei

Standard siren cosmology with gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers in active galactic nuclei

Gravitational wave luminosity distance-weighted anisotropies

Measurements of the luminosity distance of propagating gravitational waves can provide invaluable information on the geometry and content of our Universe. Due to the clustering of cosmic structures, in realistic situations we need to average the luminosity distance of events coming from patches inside a volume. In this work we evaluate, in a gauge-invariant and fully-relativistic treatment, the impact of cosmological perturbations on such averaging process. We find that clustering, lensing and peculiar velocity effects impact estimates for future detectors such as Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer, the Big Bang Observer and DECIGO. The signal-to-noise ratio of the angular power spectrum of the average luminosity distance over all the redshift bins is 17 in the case of binary black holes detected by Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer. We also provide fitting formulas for the corrections to the average luminosity distance due to general relativistic effects.

Accretion onto a Supermassive Black Hole Binary before Merger

While supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) inspiral toward merger they may also accrete matter from a surrounding disk. To study the dynamics of this system requires simultaneously describing the evolving spacetime and the magnetized plasma. We present the first relativistic calculation simulating two equal-mass, nonspinning black holes as they inspiral from a 20 M (G = c = 1) initial separation almost to merger. Our results imply important observational consequences: for instance, the accretion rate Ṁ onto the black holes first decreases and then plateaus, dropping by only a factor of ∼3 despite the rapid inspiral. An estimated bolometric light curve follows the same profile, suggesting some merging SMBBHs may be significantly luminous past the predicted circumbinary disk decoupling. The minidisks are nonstandard: Reynolds, not Maxwell, stresses dominate, and they oscillate between two states. In one part of the cycle, “sloshing” streams transfer mass between minidisks, carrying kinetic energy at a rate sometimes as high as the peak minidisk bolometric luminosity. We also discover that episodic accretion drives time-varying minidisk tilts. These complex dynamics all contribute to unique cyclical behavior in the light curves of late-time inspiraling SMBBHs. The poloidal magnetic flux on the black holes is roughly constant at a dimensionless level ϕ ∼ 2–3, but doubles just before merger; for significant black hole spin, this flux predicts powerful jets with variability driven by binary dynamics, another potentially unique electromagnetic signature. This simulation is the first to employ our multipatch infrastructure PatchworkMHD, decreasing the computational expense to ∼3% of conventional single-grid methods’ cost.

Fast X-ray/IR observations of the black hole transient Swift J1753.5–0127: From an IR lead to a very long jet lag

We report two epochs of simultaneous near-infrared (IR) and X-ray observations of the low-mass X-ray binary black hole candidate Swift J1753.5–0127 with a subsecond time resolution during its long 2005–2016 outburst. Data were collected strictly simultaneously with VLT/ISAAC (KS band, 2.2 μm) and RXTE (2–15 keV) or XMM-Newton (0.7–10 keV). A clear correlation between the X-ray and the IR variable emission is found during both epochs but with very different properties. In the first epoch, the near-IR variability leads the X-ray by ∼130 ms, which is the opposite of what is usually observed in similar systems. The correlation is more complex in the second epoch, with both anti-correlation and correlations at negative and positive lags. Frequency-resolved Fourier analysis allows us to identify two main components in the complex structure of the phase lags: the first component, characterised by a near-IR lag of a few seconds at low frequencies, is consistent with a combination of disc reprocessing and a magnetised hot flow; the second component is identified at high frequencies by a near-IR lag of ≈0.7 s. Given the similarities of this second component with the well-known constant optical/near-IR jet lag observed in other black hole transients, we tentatively interpret this feature as a signature of a longer-than-usual jet lag. We discuss the possible implications of measuring such a long jet lag in a radio-quiet black hole transient.

Effective-one-body waveform model for noncircularized, planar, coalescing black hole binaries: The importance of radiation reaction

Effective-one-body waveform model for noncircularized, planar, coalescing black hole binaries: The importance of radiation reaction

Detecting the tidal heating with the generic extreme mass-ratio inspirals

The horizon of a classical black hole (BH), functioning as a one-way membrane, plays a vital role in the dynamic evolution of binary BHs, capable of absorbing fluxes entirely.Tidal heating, stemming from this phenomenon, exerts a notable influence on the production of gravitational waves (GWs). If at least one member of a binary is an exotic compact object (ECO) instead of a BH, the absorption of fluxes is expected to be incomplete and the tidal heating would be different. Thus, tidal heating can be utilized for model-independent investigations into the nature of compact object. In this paper, assuming that the extreme mass-ratio inspiral (EMRI) contains a stellar-mass compact object orbiting around a massive ECO with a reflective surface, we compute the GWs from the generic EMRI orbits. Using the accurate and analytic flux formulas in the black hole spacetime, we adapted these formulas in the vicinity of the ECO surface by incorporating a reflectivity parameter.Under the adiabatic approximation, we can evolve the orbital parameters and compute the EMRI waveforms. The effect of tidal heating for the spinning and non-spinning objects can be used to constrain the reflectivity of the surface at the level of 𝒪(10-6) by computing the mismatch and fisher information matrix.

Charged AdS black holes with higher derivative corrections in the presence of string cloud

We have obtained charged asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) black hole solutions in Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet gravity in the presence of string cloud. It turns out that there exist three black holes in certain range of parameters for small enough chemical potential. However, for large chemical potential, these black holes merge into a single one. The free energy of the black holes is computed from the on-shell Euclidean action by subtracting the contribution of an extremal black hole. We have studied the free energy and specific heat of the solutions, which shows that the medium-sized black hole is unstable. As an application, we have studied the quark–antiquark potential in the dual gauge theory. This study provides necessary ingredients for the study of the dual theories in the context of condensed matter systems.

ENTROPY OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

Gravitational waves (GWs), the propagating perturbations within the structure of spacetime, provide a unique window into the dynamics of massive celestial objects and their cataclysmic events such as binary black hole (BBH), black hole – neutron star, binary neutron star (BNS) merger. While the detection and analysis of GWs have significantly advanced our understanding of the universe, the exploration of their information content, specifically their entropy, is not well studied and remains an intriguing avenue of research. This article presents an application of the concept of entropy to GWs and its implications for astrophysics. By using masses of the detected GW sources provided by open-source Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC) and the PyCBC library, we generated GWs using different models and approximations. Specifically, we employed three different waveform models: IMRPhenomPv3, IMRPhenomPv2_NRTidal, and IMRPhenomXPHM. After generating GWs with different models we investigated the relationship between entropy and the masses of GW sources. Besides varying values in different models, entropy nearly exponentially decreases while the total mass of the systems providing those GWs increases. Additionally, different waveform models demonstrated varying levels of entropy. This study opens avenues for further research on the underlying physics of GWs and their detection and classification methods.

Search for Eccentric Black Hole Coalescences during the Third Observing Run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of binary black hole coalescences confidently observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include the effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that have already been identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total source-frame mass M > 70 M ⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz emitted gravitational-wave frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place a conservative upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0 < e ≤ 0.3 at 16.9 Gpc−3 yr−1 at the 90% confidence level.

Navigating Unknowns: Deep Learning Robustness for Gravitational-wave Signal Reconstruction

We present a rapid and reliable deep-learning-based method for gravitational-wave (GW) signal reconstruction from elusive, generic binary black hole mergers in LIGO data. We demonstrate that our model, AWaRe, effectively recovers GWs with parameters it has not encountered during training. This includes features like higher black hole masses, additional harmonics, eccentricity, and varied waveform systematics, which introduce complex modulations in the waveform’s amplitudes and phases. The accurate reconstructions of these unseen signal characteristics demonstrate AWaRe's ability to handle complex features in the waveforms. By directly incorporating waveform reconstruction uncertainty estimation into the AWaRe framework, we show that for real GW events, the uncertainties in AWaRe's reconstructions align closely with those achieved by benchmark algorithms like BayesWave and coherent WaveBurst. The robustness of our model to real GW events and its ability to extrapolate to unseen data open new avenues for investigations in various aspects of GW astrophysics and data analysis, including tests of general relativity and the enhancement of current GW search methodologies.

Greybody factors imprinted on black hole ringdowns. II. Merging binary black holes

Greybody factors imprinted on black hole ringdowns. II. Merging binary black holes

Periodicity significance testing with null-signal templates: reassessment of PTF’s SMBH binary candidates

ABSTRACT Periodograms are widely employed for identifying periodicity in time series data, yet they often struggle to accurately quantify the statistical significance of detected periodic signals when the data complexity precludes reliable simulations. We develop a data-driven approach to address this challenge by introducing a null-signal template (NST). The NST is created by carefully randomizing the period of each cycle in the periodogram template, rendering it non-periodic. It has the same frequentist properties as a periodic signal template, and we show with simulations that the distribution of false positives is the same as with the original periodic template, regardless of the underlying data. Thus, performing a periodicity search with the NST acts as an effective simulation of the null (no-signal) hypothesis, without having to simulate the noise properties of the data. We apply the NST method to the supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHB) search in the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), where Charisi et al. had previously proposed 33 high signal-to-noise candidates utilizing simulations to quantify their significance. Our approach reveals that these simulations do not capture the complexity of the real data. There are no statistically significant periodic signal detections above the non-periodic background. To improve the search sensitivity, we introduce a Gaussian quadrature based algorithm for the Bayes Factor with correlated noise as a test statistic. We show with simulations that this improves sensitivity to true signals by more than an order of magnitude. However, the Bayes Factor approach also results in no statistically significant detections in the PTF data.

Detection of the Fe K lines from the binary AGN in 4C+37.11

We report the discovery of the Fe K line emission at $ $ keV with a width of $ $ keV using two epochs of Chandra archival data for the nucleus of the galaxy 4C+37.11, which is known to host a binary supermassive black hole (BSMBH) system where the SMBHs are separated by $ mas or sim 7pc. Our study reports the first detection of the Fe K line from a known binary AGN, which has an F-statistic value of 20.98 and a probability of $2.47 $. Stacking two spectra reveals another Fe K line component at $ $ keV. Different model scenarios indicate that the lines originate from the combined effects of accretion disk emission and circumnuclear collisionally ionized medium. The observed low column density favors a gas-poor merger scenario, where the high temperature of the hot ionized medium may be associated with the shocked gas in the binary merger and not with star formation activity. The estimated total BSMBH mass and disk inclination are $ $ M$_ and $ indicating that the BSMBH is probably a high-inclination system. We were not able to tightly constrain the spin parameter using the present data sets. Our results draw attention to the fact that detecting the Fe K line emissions from BSMBHs is important for estimating the individual SMBH masses and the spins of the binary SMBHs, as well as for exploring their emission regions.

Kalman tracking and parameter estimation of continuous gravitational waves with a pulsar timing array

Abstract Continuous nanohertz gravitational waves from individual supermassive black hole binaries may be detectable with pulsar timing arrays. A novel search strategy is developed, wherein intrinsic achromatic spin wandering is tracked simultaneously with the modulation induced by a single gravitational wave source in the pulse times of arrival. A two-step inference procedure is applied within a state-space framework, such that the modulation is tracked with a Kalman filter, which then provides a likelihood for nested sampling. The procedure estimates the static parameters in the problem, such as the sky position of the source, without fitting for ensemble-averaged statistics such as the power spectral density of the timing noise, and therefore complements traditional parameter estimation methods. It also returns the Bayes factor relating a model with a single gravitational wave source to one without, complementing traditional detection methods. It is shown via astrophysically representative software injections in Gaussian measurement noise that the procedure distinguishes a gravitational wave from pure noise down to a characteristic wave strain of h0 ≈ 2 × 10−15. Full posterior distributions of model parameters are recovered and tested for accuracy. There is a bias of ≈0.3 rad in the marginalised one-dimensional posterior for the orbital inclination ι, introduced by dropping the so-called ‘pulsar terms’. Smaller biases $\lesssim 10~{{\%}}$ are also observed in other static parameters.

The effect of stellar rotation on black hole mass and spin

Abstract The gravitational wave signature of a binary black hole (BBH) merger is dependent on its component mass and spin. If such black holes originate from rapidly rotating progenitors, the large angular momentum reserve in the star could drive a collapsar-like supernova explosion, hence substantially impacting these characteristics of the black holes in the binary. To examine the effect of stellar rotation on the resulting black hole mass and spin, we conduct a 1D general relativistic study of the end phase of the stellar collapse. We find that the resulting black hole mass at times differs significantly from the previously assumed values. We quantify the dependence of the black hole spin magnitude on the hydrodynamics of the accretion flow, providing analytical relations for calculating the mass and spin based on the progenitor’s pre-collapse properties. Depending on the nature of the accretion flow, our findings have implications for the black hole upper mass gap resulting from pair-instability supernovae, the maximum mass of a maximally rotating stellar black hole, and the maximum effective spin of a BBH formed in a tidally locked helium star - black hole binary.

Evidence for gravitational self-lensing of the central supermassive black hole binary in the Seyfert galaxy NGC 1566

It is generally accepted that all massive galaxies host supermassive black holes (BHs) in their center and that mergers of two galaxies lead to the formation of BH binaries. The most interesting among them comprise the mergers in their final state, that is to say\ with parsec (3.2 light years) or sub-parsec orbital separations. It is possible to detect these systems with binary self-lensing. Here we report the potential detection of a central supermassive BH binary in the active galaxy (AGN) NGC\,1566 based on a microlensing outburst. The light curve of the outburst -- based on observations with the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae -- lasted from the beginning of 2017 until the beginning of 2020. The steep symmetric light curve as well as its shape look very different with respect to normal random variations in AGN. However, the observations could be easily reproduced with a best-fit standard microlensing light curve. Based on the light curve, we derived a characteristic timescale of 155 days. During the outburst, the continuum as well as the broad line intensities varied; however, the narrow emission lines did not. This is an indication that the lensing object orbits the AGN nucleus between the broad line region (BLR) and the narrow line region (NLR), that is, at a distance on the order of 250 light days. The light curve can be reproduced by a lens with a BH mass of $5 M_ odot $. This implies a mass ratio to the central AGN on the order of 1 to 10.

Detection and prediction of future massive black hole mergers with machine learning and truncated waveforms

Detection and prediction of future massive black hole mergers with machine learning and truncated waveforms

Predicting gravitational wave signals from BPASS White Dwarf Binary and Black Hole Binary populations of a Milky Way-like galaxy model for LISA

Abstract Galactic white dwarf binaries (WDBs) and black hole binaries (BHBs) will be gravitational wave (GW) sources for LISA. Their detection will provide insights into binary evolution and the evolution of our Galaxy through cosmic history. Here, we make predictions of the expected WDB and BHB population within our Galaxy. We combine predictions of the compact remnant binary populations expected by stellar evolution from the detailed Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) code, with a Milky Way analogue galaxy model from the Feedback In Realistic Environment (FIRE) simulations. We use PhenomA and legwork to simulate LISA observations. Both packages make similar predictions that on average four Galactic BHBs and 673 Galactic WDBs are above the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold of 7 after a four-year mission. We compare these predictions to earlier results using the Binary Star Evolution (BSE) code with the same FIRE model galaxy. We find that BPASS predicts a few more LISA observable Galactic BHBs and a twentieth of the Galactic WDBs. The differences are due to the different physical assumptions that have gone into the binary evolution calculations. These results indicate that the expected population of compact binaries that LISA will detect depends very sensitively on the binary population synthesis models used and thus observations of the LISA population will provide tight constraints on our modelling of binary stars. Finally, from our synthetic populations we have created mock LISA signals that can be used to test and refine data processing methods of the eventual LISA observations.

Signatures of Gravitational Atoms from Black Hole Mergers

Signatures of Gravitational Atoms from Black Hole Mergers