Rotational Brownian Motion of a Massive Binary

Abstract

The orientation of a massive binary undergoes a random walk due to gravitational encounters with field stars. The rotational diffusion coefficient for a circular-orbit binary is derived via scattering experiments. The binary is shown to reorient itself by an angle of order (m/M)^1/2 during the time that its semi-major axis shrinks appreciably, where M is the binary mass and m the perturber mass. Implications for the orientations of rotating black holes are discussed.

16 pages, 3 postscript figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 568, 2002

References in corpus (2)

• Formation of Galactic Nuclei
• Brownian Motion of a Massive Binary

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