Quiescent and Active Galactic Nuclei as Factories of Merging Compact Objects in the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Sedda, Manuel Arca; Naoz, Smadar; Kocsis, Bence

doi:10.3390/universe9030138

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 548 publications

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“…The Milky Way's galactic nucleus offers a natural place for the formation of bursting BBHs (see, e.g., Kocsis & Levin 2012;Hoang et al 2019;Stephan et al 2019;Arca Sedda et al 2023;Zhang & Chen 2024). In particular, BBHs orbiting around the supermassive black hole in the galactic nucleus will undergo eccentricity excitation via the EKL mechanism, resulting in the bursting signatures on their GW signal.…”

Section: Bbhs In the Galactic Nucleusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Gravitational Wave Bursts from Stellar-mass Binaries in the mHz Band

Xuan,

Naoz,

Kocsis

et al. 2024

ApJ

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The dynamical formation channels of gravitational wave (GW) sources typically involve a stage when the compact object binary source interacts with the environment, which may excite its eccentricity, yielding efficient GW emission. For the wide eccentric compact object binaries, the GW emission happens mostly near the pericenter passage, creating a unique, burst-like signature in the waveform. This work examines the possibility of stellar-mass bursting sources in the mHz band for future LISA detections. Because of their long lifetime (∼107 yr) and promising detectability, the number of mHz bursting sources can be large in the local Universe. For example, based on our estimates, there will be ∼3–45 bursting binary black holes in the Milky Way, with ∼102–104 bursts detected during the LISA mission. Moreover, we find that the number of bursting sources strongly depends on their formation history. If certain regions undergo active formation of compact object binaries in the recent few million years, there will be a significantly higher bursting source fraction. Thus, the detection of mHz GW bursts not only serves as a clue for distinguishing different formation channels, but also helps us understand the star formation history in different regions of the Milky Way.

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Section: Bbhs In the Galactic Nucleusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Gravitational Wave Bursts from Stellar-mass Binaries in the mHz Band

Xuan,

Naoz,

Kocsis

et al. 2024

ApJ

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“…The astrophysical pathways to black hole (BH) mergers discovered by the LIGO (LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al 2015), Virgo (Acernese et al 2015), and KAGRA (Akutsu et al 2021) gravitational-wave (GW) observatories have been actively debated (Barack et al 2019). Various scenarios have been proposed, including isolated binary evolution (e.g., Dominik et al 2012;Kinugawa et al 2014;Belczynski et al 2016;Tagawa et al 2018;Spera et al 2019;Tanikawa et al 2022) evolution of triple or quadruple systems (e.g., Antonini et al 2017;Silsbee & Tremaine 2017;Fragione & Kocsis 2019;Michaely & Perets 2019;Martinez et al 2022;Bartos et al 2023), dynamical evolution in star clusters (e.g., Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000;Samsing et al 2014;O'Leary et al 2016;Rodriguez et al 2016;Banerjee 2017;Fragione & Kocsis 2018;Kumamoto et al 2018;Perna et al 2019;Rasskazov & Kocsis 2019;Antonini et al 2023), and compact objects in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks (e.g., Bartos et al 2017;Stone et al 2017;McKernan et al 2018;Tagawa et al 2020b;Arca Sedda et al 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shock Cooling and Breakout Emission for Optical Flares Associated with Gravitational-wave Events

Tagawa,

Kimura,

Haiman

et al. 2024

ApJ

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The astrophysical origin of stellar-mass black hole (BH) mergers discovered through gravitational waves (GWs) is widely debated. Mergers in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) represent promising environments for at least a fraction of these events, with possible observational clues in the GW data. An additional clue to unveil AGN merger environments is provided by possible electromagnetic emission from postmerger accreting BHs. Associated with BH mergers in AGN disks, emission from shocks emerging around jets launched by accreting merger remnants is expected. Here we compute the properties of the emission produced during breakout and the subsequent adiabatic expansion phase of the shocks, and we then apply this model to optical flares suggested to be possibly associated with GW events. We find that the majority of the reported flares can be explained by breakout and shock cooling emission. If the optical flares are produced by shock cooling emission, they would display moderate color evolution, possibly color variations among different events, and a positive correlation between delay time and flare duration and would be preceded by breakout emission in X-rays. If the breakout emission dominates the observed lightcurve, we predict the color to be distributed in a narrow range in the optical band and the delay time from GW to electromagnetic emission to be longer than ∼2 days. Hence, further explorations of delay time distributions, flare color evolution, and associated X-ray emission will be useful to test the proposed emission model for the observed flares.

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“…Due to the unique nature of an AGN (strong gravity from a central supermassive black hole, high stellar density in the nuclear cluster, and the presence of an accretion disk), BBH mergers in the AGN disk exhibit several peculiarities, such as being hierarchical (e.g., Yang et al 2019a;Tagawa et al 2021b) or eccentric (e.g., Tagawa et al 2021a;Samsing et al 2022). The merger rate of BBHs with an AGN disk origin ranges from O(10 −3 ) to O(10 2 ) Gpc −3 yr −1 (see Table 1 in Arca Sedda et al 2023). Despite significant uncertainty, these mergers can make a substantial contribution to the overall population with the inferred redshift-dependent merger rate of 17.9-44 Gpc −3 yr −1 (Abbott et al 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electromagnetic Counterparts Powered by Kicked Remnants of Black Hole Binary Mergers in AGN Disks

Chen,

Dai

2024

ApJ

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The disk of an active galactic nucleus (AGN) is widely regarded as a prominent formation channel of binary black hole (BBH) mergers that can be detected through gravitational waves (GWs). Besides, the presence of dense environmental gas offers the potential for an embedded BBH merger to produce electromagnetic (EM) counterparts. In this paper, we investigate EM emission powered by the kicked remnant of a BBH merger occurring within the AGN disk. The remnant BH will launch a jet via the accretion of a magnetized medium as it traverses the disk. The resulting jet will decelerate and dissipate energy into a lateral cocoon as it propagates. We explore three radiation mechanisms of the jet–cocoon system—jet breakout emission, disk cocoon cooling emission, and jet cocoon cooling emission—and find that the jet cocoon cooling emission is likely to be detected in its own frequency bands. We predict a soft X-ray transient, lasting for O(103) s, to serve as an EM counterpart, of which the time delay O(10) days after the GW trigger contributes to follow-up observations. Consequently, BBH mergers in the AGN disk represent a novel multimessenger source. In the future, enhanced precision in measuring and localizing GWs, coupled with diligent searches for such associated EM signals, will effectively validate or restrict the origin of BBH mergers in the AGN disk.

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Quiescent and Active Galactic Nuclei as Factories of Merging Compact Objects in the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Cited by 11 publications

References 548 publications

Detecting Gravitational Wave Bursts from Stellar-mass Binaries in the mHz Band

Detecting Gravitational Wave Bursts from Stellar-mass Binaries in the mHz Band

Shock Cooling and Breakout Emission for Optical Flares Associated with Gravitational-wave Events

Electromagnetic Counterparts Powered by Kicked Remnants of Black Hole Binary Mergers in AGN Disks

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