Relativistic three-body effects in black hole coalescence

Abstract

Three-body interactions are expected to be common in globular clusters and in galactic cores hosting supermassive black holes. Here we consider an equal-mass binary-black-hole system in the presence of a third black hole. Using numerically generated binary-black-hole initial-data sets, and first- and second-order post-Newtonian (1PN and 2PN) techniques, we find that the presence of the third black hole has non-negligible relativistic effects on the location of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), and that these effects arise at 2PN order. In particular, we study the more astrophysically realistic situation of a stellar-mass black-hole binary in orbit about a third supermassive black hole. In general, the proximity of the massive black hole has stabilizing effects on the orbiting binary, leading to an increase in merger time and a decrease of the terminal orbital frequency, and an amplification of the gravitational radiation emitted from the binary system by up to 6 percent.

arXiv commentTo appear in Physical Review D. 4 pages, 3 figures, RevTex

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• Collinear solution to the general relativistic three-body problem
• Black-Hole Lattices as Cosmological Models
• Choreographic solution to the general relativistic three-body problem
• Post-Newtonian effects on Lagrange's equilateral triangular solution for the three-body problem
• Uniqueness of collinear solutions for the relativistic three-body problem
• About gravitational-wave generation by a three-body system
• Innermost stable circular orbits in Majumdar--Papapetrou dihole spacetime
• Can N-body systems generate periodic gravitational waves?
• Perturbational Treatment of the Gravitational Potential Effect on Binary Black Hole Evolution
• Study of multi black hole and ring singularity apparent horizons