AMNH: Black Hole Mergers: Cooking with Gas

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AMNH: Black Hole Mergers: Cooking with Gas

Post by bystander » Sat Nov 16, 2019 5:18 pm

Black Hole Mergers: Cooking with Gas
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.

“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
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