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Eccentric Mergers in AGN Discs: Influence of the Supermassive Black-Hole on Three-body Interactions

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arxiv 2402.16948 v2 pith:4IZPJNRN submitted 2024-02-26 astro-ph.GA

Gaia Fabj , Johan Samsing This is my paper · ORCID
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keywords mergerseccentricinteractionsfractionblacksinglesmbhaxis
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There are indications that stellar-origin black holes (BHs) are efficiently paired up in binary black holes (BBHs) in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) disc environments, which can undergo interactions with single BHs in the disc. Such binary-single interactions can potentially lead to an exceptionally high fraction of gravitational-wave mergers with measurable eccentricity in LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA. We here take the next important step in this line of studies, by performing post-Newtonian N-body simulations between migrating BBHs and single BHs set in an AGN disc-like configuration with a consistent inclusion of the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the equations of motion. With this setup, we study how the fraction of eccentric mergers varies in terms of the initial size of the BBH semi-major axis relative to the Hill sphere, as well as how it depends on the angle between the BBH and the incoming single BH. We find that the fraction of eccentric mergers is still relatively large, even when the interactions are notably influenced by the gravitational field of the nearby SMBH. However, the fraction as a function of the BBH semi-major axis does not follow a smooth functional shape, but instead shows strongly varying features that originate from the underlying phase-space structure. The phase-space further reveals that many of the eccentric mergers are formed through prompt scatterings. Finally, we present the first analytical solution to how the presence of an SMBH in terms of its Hill sphere affects the probability for forming eccentric BBH mergers through chaotic three-body interactions.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Dissecting environmental effects with eccentric gravitational wave sources

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Resonances between oscillating environmental forces and the epicyclic motion of eccentric binaries can dominate gravitational wave dephasing over orbit-averaged drag for eccentricities above about 0.05.

  2. Environmental effects in stellar mass gravitational wave sources II: Enhanced detectability of phase shifts in eccentric sub-populations

    astro-ph.HE 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentricity boosts the detectability of environmental dephasing in gravitational-wave signals by up to ℓ_max^{1-n}, potentially making environmental effects ubiquitous in future detectors' eccentric sources.

  3. Chase Orbits, not Time: A Scalable Paradigm for Long-Duration Eccentric Gravitational-Wave Surrogates

    gr-qc 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentric inspiral waveforms are modeled against mean anomaly rather than time, yielding an order-of-magnitude compression and a 2.77e6 M surrogate that is ~20x faster to evaluate.

  4. Gaseous Dynamical Friction on Hyperbolic Scatterings

    astro-ph.GA 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Equal-mass hyperbolic encounters in a uniform gas lose orbital energy, mostly lose eccentricity, and experience non-frictional forces that the standard Ostriker (1999) rectilinear model fails to capture.

  5. Simulation of Binary-Single Interactions in AGN Disk I: Gas-Enhanced Binary Orbital Hardening

    astro-ph.HE 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gas in AGN disks absorbs orbital energy during binary-single black hole encounters, making the final binary more compact and shortening its gravitational-wave merger time.

  6. Constraining Proper Motion of Strongly Lensed Eccentric Binary Mergers using Doppler Triangulation

    astro-ph.HE 2025-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Doppler-induced GW phase shifts between lensed images of eccentric binaries grow with time only until e about 0.7, then decline, giving a factor of about 2 boost over circular sources at the same frequency.

  7. Measuring the Transverse Velocity of Strongly Lensed Gravitational Wave Sources with Ground Based Detectors

    astro-ph.HE 2024-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Strongly lensed gravitational waves carry a Doppler-induced phase shift between images that reveals the transverse velocity of the source, detectable with Einstein Telescope.

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