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Black Hole Accretion and Spin-up Through Stellar Collisions in Dense Star Clusters

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arxiv 2410.01879 v2 pith:AJES6ZKT submitted 2024-10-02 astro-ph.HE

Black Hole Accretion and Spin-up Through Stellar Collisions in Dense Star Clusters

classification astro-ph.HE
keywords blackcollisionsholesholeaccretionclustersspinstar
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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abstract

Dynamical interactions in dense star clusters could significantly influence the properties of black holes, leaving imprints on their gravitational-wave signatures. While previous studies have mostly focused on repeated black hole mergers for spin and mass growth, this work examines the impact of physical collisions and close encounters between black holes and (non-compact) stars. Using Monte Carlo N-body models of dense star clusters, we find that a large fraction of black holes retained upon formation undergo collisions with stars. Within our explored cluster models, the proportion of binary black hole mergers affected by stellar collisions ranges from $10\%$ to $60\%$. If all stellar-mass black holes are initially non-spinning, we find that up to $40\%$ of merging binary black holes may have components with dimensionless spin parameter $\chi\gtrsim 0.2$ because of prior stellar collisions, while typically about $10\%$ have spins near $\chi = 0.7$ from prior black hole mergers. We demonstrate that young star clusters are especially important environments as they can produce collisions of black holes with very massive stars, allowing significant spin up of the black holes through accretion. Our predictions for black hole spin distributions from these stellar collisions highlight their sensitivity to accretion efficiency, underscoring the need for detailed hydrodynamic calculations to better understand the accretion physics following these interactions.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

  1. Population Properties of Binary Black Holes with Eccentricity

    astro-ph.HE 2026-02 conditional novelty 8.0

    First joint population inference on binary black hole eccentricity from GWTC-4 bounds the eccentric branching ratio below 5% at 90% confidence, with results consistent with quasi-circular models but highly model-dependent.

  2. A Four-dimensional Model-agnostic Probe into the Astrophysical Origins of Binary Black Hole Subpopulations

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    A GPU-accelerated binned Gaussian process yields the first model-agnostic 4D BBH population in (m1, q, χeff, χp), revealing four mass-based subpopulations and new spin-mass-ratio correlations.

  3. Formation of rotating supergiants via stellar mergers in dense clusters: Implications for black hole natal spins

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Stellar mergers with mass ratio q≳0.3 in young clusters can produce blue-supergiant progenitors that leave black holes with dimensionless spins a≃0.5–0.8, reducing post-merger retention and hierarchical-merger rates.

  4. The first decade of gravitational-wave measurements of black hole spins

    gr-qc 2026-06 conditional novelty 1.0

    A decade of gravitational-wave data shows most merging stellar-mass black holes have small spins, with subdominant fast-spinning, misaligned, and hierarchical-merger populations.

  5. The first decade of gravitational-wave measurements of black hole spins

    gr-qc 2026-06 unverdicted

    A review summarizing formation-channel predictions, waveform effects, and population-level constraints on stellar-mass black hole spins from the first decade of gravitational-wave observations.