A conservation-based method for simulating the inspiral of binary black holes

Abstract

We present a new approach to studying the evolution of massive black hole binaries in a stellar environment. By imposing conservation of total energy and angular momentum in scattering experiments, we find the dissipation forces that are exerted on the black holes by the stars, and thus obtain the decaying path of the binary from the classical dynamical friction regime down to subparsec scales. Our scheme lies between scattering experiments and N-body simulations. While still resolving collisions between stars and black holes, it is fast enough and allows to use a large enough number of particles to reach a smooth and convergent result. We studied both an equal mass and a 10:1 mass ratio binaries under various initial conditions. We show that while an equal mass binary stalls at a nearly circular orbit, a runaway growth of eccentricity occurs in the unequal mass case. This effect reduces the timescale for black hole coalescence through gravitational radiation to well below the Hubble time, even in spherical and gasless systems formed by dry mergers.

11 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Massive black hole binary mergers within sub-pc scale gas discs
• The Structure & Dynamics of Massive Early-type Galaxies: On Homology, Isothermality and Isotropy inside one Effective Radius
• Self consistent model for the evolution of eccentric massive black hole binaries in stellar environments: implications for gravitational wave observations
• Dynamical Friction around Supermassive Black Holes
• Dynamical friction of massive objects in galactic centres
• Large scale inhomogeneity and local dynamical friction
• Massive perturbers and the efficient merger of binary massive black holes

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The final-parsec problem in the collisionless limit
• Expansion Techniques for Collisionless Stellar Dynamical Simulations
• Secular Dynamical Anti-Friction in Galactic Nuclei
• The kinematic signature of the inspiral phase of massive binary black holes
• Evolution of binary supermassive black holes and the final-parsec problem
• Eccentricity Evolution in Gaseous Dynamical Friction