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Mergers of Black Holes in the Galactic Center

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F. Elliott Koch1 and Bradley M. S. Hansen1

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We present the results of three-body simulations focused on understanding the fates of intermediate-mass black holes (IBHs) that drift within the central 0.5 pc of the Galaxy. In particular, we modeled the interactions between pairs of 4000 Msun black holes as they orbit a central black hole (CBH) of mass 4 × 106 Msun. The simulations performed assume a Schwarzschild geometry and account for Chandrasekhar dynamical friction as well as acceleration resulting from energy lost due to gravitational radiation. We found the branching ratio for one of the orbiting IBHs to merge with the CBH was 0.95 and is independent of the inner IBH's initial eccentricity as well as the rate of sinking. This, coupled with an infall rate of ~107 yr for an IBH to drift into the Galactic center, results in an IBH-CBH merger every lesssim11 Myr. Lastly, we found that the IBH-IBH-CBH triple-body system "resets" itself, in the sense that a system with an inner IBH with an initially circular orbit generally left behind an IBH with a large eccentricity, whereas a system in which the inner IBH had a high eccentricity (e0 ~ 0.9) usually left a remnant with low eccentricity. Branching ratios for different outcomes are also similar in the two cases.

Subject headings

black hole physics; Galaxy: center; methods: N-body simulations; relativity


Dates

Issue 1 (2008 November 1)

Received 2007 December 3, accepted for publication 2008 July 4



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