American Museum of Natural History | 2019 Nov 14
New Study Proposes Light Signature for Detecting Black Hole Mergers
Gravitational wave detectors are finding black hole mergers in the universe at the rate of one per week. If these mergers occur in empty space, researchers cannot see associated light that is needed to determine where they happened. However, a new study ... suggests that researchers might finally be able to see light from black hole mergers if the collisions happen in the presence of gas.
- In this artist’s conception of a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, dust and gas form a swirling disk as they fall onto the hole, attracted by its gravity. A new study suggests researchers may be able to see light from the effect black hole mergers have on the gas in the disk. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“With a light signature, astronomers could easily pinpoint the cosmic location of these mergers and study them in much more detail than is presently possible,” said paper author Barry McKernan ...
Black holes form when massive stars die. Much like dense objects sinking into a river on Earth, black holes tend to sink into regions of galaxies where gravity is strongest. It is believed that large numbers of black holes build up in the centers of galaxies, where a much larger, single, supermassive black hole lurks.
If individual small black holes pass close enough to each other as they orbit, their mutual gravity allows them to pair off and orbit each other, while also orbiting the central supermassive black hole. But a second random close encounter with another small black hole can easily break apart such a pairing. ...
Ram-Pressure Stripping of a Kicked Hill Sphere: Prompt Electromagnetic Emission
from the Merger of Stellar Mass Black Holes in an AGN Accretion Disk ~ B. McKernan et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 884(2):L50 (2019 Oct 20) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab4886
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1907.03746 > 08 Jul 2019 (v1), 30 Sep 2019 (v2)