Warped Circumbinary Disks in Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

We study a warping instability of a geometrically thin, non-self-gravitating disk surrounding binary supermassive black holes on a circular orbit. Such a circumbinary disk is subject to not only tidal torques due to the binary gravitational potential but also radiative torques due to radiation emitted from an accretion disk around each black hole. We find that a circumbinary disk initially aligned with the binary orbital plane is unstable to radiation-driven warping beyond the marginally stable warping radius, which is sensitive to both the ratio of vertical to horizontal shear viscosities and the mass-to-energy conversion efficiency. As expected, the tidal torques give no contribution to the growth of warping modes but tend to align the circumbinary disk with the orbital plane. Since the tidal torques can suppress the warping modes in the inner part of circumbinary disk, the circumbinary disk starts to be warped at radii larger than the marginally stable warping radius. If the warping radius is of the order of 0.1 pc, a resultant semi-major axis is estimated to be of the order of 10^-2 pc to 10^-4 pc for 10^7 Msun black hole. We also discuss the possibility that the central objects of observed warped maser disks in active galactic nuclei are binary supermassive black holes with a triple disk: two accretion disks around the individual black holes and one circumbinary disk surrounding them.

arXiv comment23 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• A systematic search for close supermassive black hole binaries in the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey
• Warping and tearing of misaligned circumbinary disks around eccentric SMBH binaries
• Radiation-Driven Warping of Circumbinary Disks Around Eccentric Young Star Binaries