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How black holes get their kicks: Gravitational radiation recoil revisited

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arxiv astro-ph/0402056 v2 pith:3E7YVKMU submitted 2004-02-02 astro-ph gr-qc

classification astro-phgr-qc
keywords recoilblackbinaryholesmasscoalescenceestimatesfinal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Gravitational waves from the coalescence of binary black holes carry away linear momentum, causing center of mass recoil. This "radiation rocket" effect has important implications for systems with escape speeds of order the recoil velocity. We revisit this problem using black hole perturbation theory, treating the binary as a test mass spiraling into a spinning hole. For extreme mass ratios (q = m1/m2 << 1) we compute the recoil for the slow inspiral epoch of binary coalescence very accurately; these results can be extrapolated to q ~ 0.4 with modest accuracy. Although the recoil from the final plunge contributes significantly to the final recoil, we are only able to make crude estimates of its magnitude. We find that the recoil can easily reach ~ 100-200 km/s, but most likely does not exceed ~ 500 km/s. Though much lower than previous estimates, this recoil is large enough to have important astrophysical consequences. These include the ejection of black holes from globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, and high-redshift dark matter halos.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

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

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    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.

  2. Unified remnant models for aligned-spin, precessing, and eccentric binary black hole mergers

    gr-qc 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    New analytic fits, gwModelRemS/P, predict remnant mass, spin, luminosity, and kick for black hole mergers from equal mass to q=1000, with a neural-flow model for precessing kicks.

  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 of 10

    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. Accurate models for recoil velocity distribution in black hole mergers with comparable to extreme mass-ratios and their astrophysical implications

    gr-qc 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    New analytic, GPR, and normalizing-flow kick models for black-hole mergers trained from q=1 to q≈200, with cluster-retention consequences.

  5. Black-hole - neutron-star mergers: new numerical-relativity simulations and multipolar effective-one-body model with spin precession and eccentricity

    gr-qc 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new catalog of 52 numerical-relativity BHNS merger simulations is used to calibrate TEOBResumS-Dalí, an improved effective-one-body waveform model with multipolar ringdown, spin precession, and eccentricity.

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