Do LIGO/Virgo Black Hole Mergers Produce AGN Flares? The Case of GW190521 and Prospects for Reaching a Confident Association

Palmese, A.; Fishbach, M.; Burke, Colin J.; Annis, J.; Liu, X.

doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac0883

Cited by 62 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The unique event GW170817 detected so far is located at z ≈ 0.01 (see Abbott et al 2017b,c); interestingly, its host galaxy NGC4993 is known to be an early-type with no ongoing star formation and old stellar populations with loosely constrained age 3 − 6 − 10 Gyr (see Im et al 2017;Troja et al 2017;Blanchard et al 2017). It has been pointed out (e.g., Palmese et al 2017;Belczynski et al 2018) that finding the very first NS-NS merger within a galaxy with old stellar populations and low SFR may be in tension with theoretical estimates. To check what happens in our framework, we first note that for NS-NS mergers (but not for BH-BH or BH-NS) in Eq.…”

Section: Gw Detection Rates From Merging Binaries In Galaxiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Merging Rates of Compact Binaries in Galaxies: Perspectives for Gravitational Wave Detections

Boco

Lapi

Goswami

et al. 2019

ApJ

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We investigate the merging rates of compact binaries in galaxies, and the related detection rate of gravitational wave (GW) events with AdvLIGO/Virgo and with the Einstein Telescope. To this purpose, we rely on three basic ingredients: (i) the redshift-dependent galaxy statistics provided by the latest determination of the star formation rate functions from UV+far-IR/(sub)millimeter/radio data; (ii) star formation and chemical enrichment histories for individual galaxies, modeled on the basis of observations; (iii) compact remnant mass distribution and prescriptions for merging of compact binaries from stellar evolution simulations. We present results for the intrinsic birthrate of compact remnants, the merging rates of compact binaries, GW detection rates and GW counts, attempting to differentiate the outcomes among BH-BH, NS-NS, and BH-NS mergers, and to estimate their occurrence in disk and spheroidal host galaxies. We compare our approach with the one based on cosmic SFR density and cosmic metallicity, exploited by many literature studies; the merging rates from the two approaches are in agreement within the overall astrophysical uncertainties. We also investigate the effects of galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing of GW in enhancing the rate of detectable events toward high-redshift. Finally, we discuss the contribution of undetected GW emission from compact binary mergers to the stochastic background.

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Section: Gw Detection Rates From Merging Binaries In Galaxiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Merging Rates of Compact Binaries in Galaxies: Perspectives for Gravitational Wave Detections

Boco

Lapi

Goswami

et al. 2019

ApJ

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“…For example, such mergers may be heavy enough to be in the pair-instability mass gap or beyond if their progenitors are higher-generation BHs (e.g., GW190521; Yang et al 2019;Abbott et al 2020a,b). Moreover, they might have associated, observable electromagnetic counterparts (de Mink & King 2017;McKernan et al 2019;Graham et al 2020;Ashton et al 2021;Palmese et al 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydrodynamical Evolution of Black-Hole Binaries Embedded in AGN Discs

Li¹,

Dong²

2022

Preprint

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Stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) discs are possible progenitors of black-hole mergers detected in gravitational waves by LIGO/VIRGO. To better understand the hydrodynamical evolution of BBHs interacting with the disc gas, we perform a suite of high-resolution 2D simulations of binaries in local disc (shearing-box) models, considering various binary mass ratios, eccentricities and background disc properties. We use the 𝛾-law equation of state and adopt a robust post-processing treatment to evaluate the mass accretion rate, torque and energy transfer rate on the binary to determine its long-term orbital evolution. We find that circular comparable-mass binaries contract, with an orbital decay rate of a few times the mass doubling rate. Eccentric binaries always experience eccentricity damping. Prograde binaries with higher eccentricities or smaller mass ratios generally have slower orbital decay rates, with some extreme cases exhibiting orbital expansion. The averaged binary mass accretion rate depends on the physical size of the accretor. The accretion flows are highly variable, and the dominant variability frequency is the apparent binary orbital frequency (in the rotating frame around the central massive BH) for circular binaries but gradually shifts to the radial epicyclic frequency as the binary eccentricity increases. Our findings demonstrate that the dynamics of BBHs embedded in AGN discs is quite different from that of isolated binaries in their own circumbinary discs. Furthermore, our results suggest that the hardening timescales of the binaries are much shorter than their migration timescales in the disc, for all reasonable binary and disc parameters.

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“…Thus far, extracting the flux from the optical counterpart of GW170817 has relied upon modeling the surface brightness profile of NGC4993 and subtracting its contribution. However, the morphology of NGC4993 is complex, and characterized by dust lanes and concentric shells (Blanchard et al 2017;Levan et al 2017;Palmese et al 2017), making accurate and uniform photometry extremely challenging. Thus, previous studies which utilized optical data suffer from a combination of imperfect galaxy subtraction and nonuniform photometric methods (Alexander et al 2018;Lyman et al 2018;Margutti et al 2018;Lamb et al 2019a;Piro et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Optical Afterglow of GW170817: An Off-axis Structured Jet and Deep Constraints on a Globular Cluster Origin

Fong

Blanchard

Alexander

et al. 2019

ApJL

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We present a revised and complete optical afterglow light curve of the binary neutron star merger GW170817, enabled by deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) F606W observations at ≈584 days post-merger, which provide a robust optical template. The light curve spans ≈ 110 − 362 days, and is fully consistent with emission from a relativistic structured jet viewed off-axis, as previously indicated by radio and X-ray data. Combined with contemporaneous radio and X-ray observations, we find no spectral evolution, with a weighted average spectral index of β = −0.583 ± 0.013, demonstrating that no synchrotron break frequencies evolve between the radio and X-ray bands over these timescales. We find that an extrapolation of the post-peak temporal slope of GW170817 to the luminosities of cosmological short GRBs matches their observed jet break times, suggesting that their explosion properties are similar, and that the primary difference in GW170817 is viewing angle. Additionally, we place a deep limit on the luminosity and mass of an underlying globular cluster of L 6.7 × 10 3 L , or M 1.3 × 10 4 M , at least 4 standard deviations below the peak of the globular cluster mass function of the host galaxy, NGC4993. This limit provides a direct and strong constraint that GW170817 did not form and merge in a globular cluster. As highlighted here, HST (and soon JWST) enables critical observations of the optical emission from neutron star merger jets and outflows.

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Do LIGO/Virgo Black Hole Mergers Produce AGN Flares? The Case of GW190521 and Prospects for Reaching a Confident Association

Cited by 62 publications

References 48 publications

Merging Rates of Compact Binaries in Galaxies: Perspectives for Gravitational Wave Detections

Merging Rates of Compact Binaries in Galaxies: Perspectives for Gravitational Wave Detections

Hydrodynamical Evolution of Black-Hole Binaries Embedded in AGN Discs

The Optical Afterglow of GW170817: An Off-axis Structured Jet and Deep Constraints on a Globular Cluster Origin

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