Shaken, not stirred: Test particles in binary black hole mergers

Abstract

Since 2015 the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) has detected a large number of gravitational wave events, originating from both binary neutron stars and binary black hole (BBH) mergers. In light of these detections, we simulate the dynamics of ambient test particles in the gravitational potential well of a BBH system close to its inspiral phase with the goal of simulating the associated electromagnetic radiation and resulting spectral energy distribution of such a BBH system. This could shed light on possible detection ranges of electromagnetic counterparts to BBH mergers. The potentials are numerically calculated using finite difference methods, under the assumption of non-rotating black holes with the post-Newtonian Paczynski-Wiita potential approximation in tandem with retarded time concepts analogous to electrodynamics. We find that the frequencies of potential electromagnetic radiation produced by these systems (possibly reaching Earth), range between a few $\text{kHz}$ to a few $100\text{MHz}$.

arXiv comment11 Pages and 8 Figures

References in corpus (23)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs
• LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray
• GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
• Fermi GBM Observations of LIGO Gravitational Wave event GW150914
• Short Gamma-Ray Bursts from the Merger of Two Black Holes
• Gravitational waves from known pulsars: results from the initial detector era
• The Progenitor of GW 150914
• Low-Latency Gravitational Wave Alerts for Multi-Messenger Astronomy During the Second Advanced LIGO and Virgo Observing Run
• Electromagnetic signals following stellar-mass black hole mergers
• Free motion around black holes with discs or rings: between integrability and chaos -- IV
• Methods and results of a search for gravitational waves associated with gamma-ray bursts using the GEO600, LIGO, and Virgo detectors
• Disks Around Merging Binary Black Holes: From GW150914 to Supermassive Black Holes
• The Paczynski-Wiita potential: A step-by-step "derivation"
• Search for Gravitational Waves Associated with Gamma-Ray Bursts Detected by Fermi and Swift During the LIGO-Virgo Run O3b
• Analysis of Sub-threshold Short Gamma-ray Bursts in Fermi GBM Data
• Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Hole Mergers Inside of Stars
• Evolution of an Accretion Disk in Binary Black Hole Systems
• Energetic constraints on electromagnetic signals from double black hole mergers
• Updates to the Fermi GBM Targeted Sub-threshold Search in Preparation for the Third Observing Run of LIGO/Virgo
• Aliasing error of the exp$(\beta \sqrt{1-z^2})$ kernel in the nonuniform fast Fourier transform
• Search for Coincident Gravitational-wave and Fast Radio Burst Events from 4-OGC and the First CHIME/FRB Catalog
• A parallel non-uniform fast Fourier transform library based on an "exponential of semicircle" kernel