Supermassive Black Hole Binaries as Galactic Blenders

Abstract

This paper focuses on the dynamical implications of close supermassive black hole binaries both as an example of resonant phase mixing and as a potential explanation of inversions and other anomalous features observed in the luminosity profiles of some elliptical galaxies. The presence of a binary comprised of black holes executing nearly periodic orbits leads to the possibility of a broad resonant coupling between the black holes and various stars in the galaxy. This can result in efficient chaotic phase mixing and, in many cases, systematic increases in the energies of stars and their consequent transport towards larger radii. Allowing for the presence of a supermassive black hole binary with plausible parameter values near the center of a spherical, or nearly spherical, galaxy characterised initially by a Nuker density profile enables one to reproduce in considerable detail the central surface brightness distributions of such galaxies as NGC 3706.

14 pages plus 15 figures, revised and condensed version to appear in Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (6)

• Triaxial Galaxies with Cusps
• Chaos and Mixing in Triaxial Stellar Systems
• Brownian Motion of a Massive Binary
• Galaxies with a Central Minimum in Stellar Luminosity Density
• Transient chaos and resonant phase mixing in violent relaxation
• Phase mixing in time-independent Hamiltonian systems

Cited by in corpus (18)

• The final-parsec problem in the collisionless limit
• Long-Term Evolution of Massive Black Hole Binaries. II. Binary Evolution in Low-Density Galaxies
• Density-potential pairs for spherical stellar systems with Sersic light-profiles and (optional) power-law cores
• Dynamics of galaxy cores and supermassive black holes
• The final-parsec problem in non-spherical galaxies revisited
• Central Stellar Mass Deficits in the Bulges of Local Lenticular Galaxies, and the Connection with Compact z ~ 1.5 Galaxies
• Sizing up Partially-Depleted Galaxy Cores
• On the transition from nuclear-cluster to black-hole dominated galaxy cores
• The influence of Massive Black Hole Binaries on the Morphology of Merger Remnants
• Orbital structure in oscillating galactic potentials
• Noise-Enhanced Parametric Resonance in Perturbed Galaxies
• Galaxies with Supermassive Binary Black Holes: (I) A Possible Model for the Centers of Core Galaxies
• Evolution of Binary Supermassive Black Holes via Chain Regularization
• The Stellar Kinematic Signature of Massive Black Hole Binaries
• Partial suppression of chaos in relativistic three-body problems
• Galaxies with Supermassive Binary Black Holes: (II) A Model with Cuspy Galactic Density Profiles
• Galaxies with Supermassive Binary Black Holes: (III) The Roche Lobes and Jiang-Yeh Lobe in a Core System
• Studying Dynamical Models of the Core Galaxy NGC 1399 with Merging Remnants