Warping and tearing of misaligned circumbinary disks around eccentric SMBH binaries

Abstract

We study the warping and tearing of a geometrically thin, non-self-gravitating disk surrounding binary supermassive black holes on an eccentric orbit. The circumbinary disk is significantly misaligned with the binary orbital plane, and is subject to the time-dependent tidal torques. In principle, such a disk is warped and precesses, and is torn into mutually misaligned rings in the region, where the tidal precession torques are stronger than the local viscous torques. We derive the tidal-warp and tearing radii of the misaligned circumbinary disks around eccentric SMBH binaries. We find that in disks with the viscosity parameter, alpha, larger than a critical value depending on the disk aspect ratio, the disk warping appears outside the tearing radius. This condition is expressed as alpha > sqrt{H/3r} for H/r ~<0.1, where H is the disk scale height. If alpha < sqrt{H/3r}, only the disk tearing occurs because the tidal warp radius is inside the tearing radius, where most of disk material is likely to rapidly accrete onto SMBHs. In warped and torn disks, both the tidal-warp and the tearing radii most strongly depend on the binary semi-major axis, although they also mildly depend on the other orbital and disk parameters. This strong dependence enables us to estimate the semi-major axis, once the tidal warp or tearing radius is determined observationally: For the tidal warp radius of 0.1 pc, the semi-major axis is estimated to be ~10^{-2} pc for 10^7 Msun black hole with typical orbital and disk parameters. We also briefly discuss the possibility that central objects of observed warped maser disks in active galactic nuclei are supermassive black hole binaries.

arXiv comment17 pages, 6 figures, submitted to JCAP. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1406.2317

References in corpus (34)

• A Fundamental Relation Between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies
• Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies
• The Demography of Massive Dark Objects in Galaxy Centres
• A Relationship Between Nuclear Black Hole Mass and Galaxy Velocity Dispersion
• Revisiting the Scaling Relations of Black Hole Masses and Host Galaxy Properties
• A Warped Accretion Disk and Wide Angle Outflow in the Inner Parsec of the Circinus Galaxy
• Gravitational waves from resolvable massive black hole binary systems and observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• The evolution of a supermassive binary caused by an accretion disc
• The Megamaser Cosmology Project. III. Accurate Masses of Seven Supermassive Black Holes in Active Galaxies with Circumnuclear Megamaser Disks
• The non-linear fluid dynamics of a warped accretion disc
• Warped accretion discs and the long periods in X-ray binaries
• Tearing up the disc: misaligned accretion on to a binary
• On the diffusive propagation of warps in thin accretion discs
• The Geometry of and Mass Accretion Rate through the Maser Accretion Disk in NGC 4258
• Wave-like warp propagation in circumbinary discs I. Analytic theory and numerical simulations
• The Megamaser Cosmology Project: I. VLBI observations of UGC 3789
• The evolution of misaligned accretion discs and spinning black holes
• Super-massive binary black holes and emission lines in active galactic nuclei
• Electromagnetic counterparts of supermassive black hole binaries resolved by pulsar timing arrays
• Alignment and Precession of a Black Hole with a Warped Accretion Disc
• The Parsec-scale Accretion Disk in NGC 3393
• The final parsec problem: aligning a binary with an external accretion disc
• The Origin of Warped, Precessing Disks in X-Ray Binaries
• Using Pulsars to Detect Massive Black Hole Binaries via Gravitational Radiation: Sagittarius A* and Nearby Galaxies
• Assembly of Protoplanetary Disks and Inclinations of Circumbinary Planets
• Is the Bardeen-Petterson effect responsible for the warping and precession in NGC 4258?
• Relativistic AGN jets I. The delicate interplay between jet structure, cocoon morphology and jet-head propagation
• The Shape of an Accretion Disc in a Misaligned Black Hole Binary
• Binary Black Hole Accretion Flows From a Misaligned Circumbinary Disk
• Misaligned accretion on to supermassive black hole binaries
• Accretion disk warping by resonant relaxation: The case of maser disk NGC4258
• A new approach for probing circumbinary disks
• Warped Circumbinary Disks in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Radiation-Driven Warping of Circumbinary Disks Around Eccentric Young Star Binaries

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A reduced orbital period for the supermassive black hole binary candidate in the quasar PG 1302-102?
• Final stage of merging binaries of supermassive black holes: observational signatures
• Detection of eccentric close-binary supermassive black holes with incomplete interferometric data
• Parsec-scale jet precession and a putative supermassive binary black hole system in the blazar AO 0235+164