Binary Disk interaction II: Gap-Opening criteria for unequal mass binaries

Abstract

We study the interaction between an unequal mass binary with an isothermal circumbinary disk, motivated by the theoretical and observational evidence that after a major merger of gas-rich galaxies, a massive gaseous disk with a SMBH binary will be formed in the nuclear region. We focus on the gravitational torques that the binary exerts onto the disk and how these torques can drive the formation of a gap in the disk. This exchange of angular momentum between the binary and the disk is mainly driven by the gravitational interaction between the binary and a strong non-axisymmetric density perturbation that is produced in the disk, as response to the presence of the binary. Using SPH numerical simulations we tested two gap-opening criterion, one that assumes that the geometry of the density perturbation is an ellipsoid/thick-spirals and another that assumes a geometry of flat-spirals for the density perturbation. We find that the flat-spirals gap opening criterion successfully predicts which simulations will have a gap on the disk and which simulations will not have a gap on the disk. We also study the limiting cases predicted by the gap-opening criteria. Since the viscosity in our simulations is considerably smaller than the expected value in the nuclear regions of gas-rich merging galaxies, we conclude that in such environments the formation of a circumbinary gap is unlikely.

References in corpus (18)

• Theory of Star Formation
• A Catalog of Quasar Properties from SDSS DR7
• A Compact Supermassive Binary Black Hole System
• A massive binary black-hole system in OJ287 and a test of general relativity
• Radiation-Hydrodynamic Simulations of Collapse and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores
• Massive black hole binary mergers within sub-pc scale gas discs
• Intense Star Formation within Resolved Compact Regions in a Galaxy at z=2.3
• Starbursts near supermassive black holes: young stars in the Galactic Center, and gravitational waves in LISA band
• Rapid Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Galaxy Mergers with Gas
• A Candidate Sub-Parsec Supermassive Binary Black Hole System
• Clustering Analyses of 300,000 Photometrically Classified Quasars--II. The Excess on Very Small Scales
• Cosmological-model-independent tests for the distance-duality relation from Galaxy Clusters and Type Ia Supernova
• Quasar Clustering at $25\kpch$ from a Complete Sample of Binaries
• A supermassive binary black hole with triple disks
• Gas pile-up, gap overflow, and Type 1.5 migration in circumbinary disks: application to supermassive black hole binaries
• Gas pile-up, gap overflow, and Type 1.5 migration in circumbinary disks: general theory
• Towards a Comprehensive Fueling-Controlled Theory on the Growth of Massive Black Holes and Host Spheroids
• Binary-disk interaction: Gap-Opening criteria

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Massive binary black holes in galactic nuclei and their path to coalescence
• A transition in circumbinary accretion discs at a binary mass ratio of 1:25
• Minidisks in Binary Black Hole Accretion
• Supermassive black hole pairs in clumpy galaxies at high redshift: delayed binary formation and concurrent mass growth
• The Evolution of Binaries in a Gaseous Medium: Three-Dimensional Simulations of Binary Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton Accretion
• Infalling clouds on to supermassive black hole binaries - II. Binary evolution and the final parsec problem
• Super massive black holes in star forming gaseous circumnuclear discs
• The effect of AGN feedback on the migration timescale of supermassive black holes binaries
• Black hole fueling in galaxy mergers: A high-resolution analysis
• The role of gas fragmentation during the formation of supermassive black holes