61 research outputs found
Big Black Hole, Little Neutron Star: Magnetic Dipole Fields in the Rindler Spacetime
As a black hole and neutron star approach during inspiral, the field lines of
a magnetized neutron star eventually thread the black hole event horizon and a
short-lived electromagnetic circuit is established. The black hole acts as a
battery that provides power to the circuit, thereby lighting up the pair just
before merger. Although originally suggested as a promising electromagnetic
counterpart to gravitational-wave detection, the luminous signals are promising
more generally as potentially detectable phenomena, such as short gamma-ray
bursts. To aid in the theoretical understanding, we present analytic solutions
for the electromagnetic fields of a magnetic dipole in the presence of an event
horizon. In the limit that the neutron star is very close to a Schwarzschild
horizon, the Rindler limit, we can solve Maxwell's equations exactly for a
magnetic dipole on an arbitrary worldline. We present these solutions here and
investigate a proxy for a small segment of the neutron star orbit around a big
black hole. We find that the voltage the black hole battery can provide is in
the range ~10^16 statvolts with a projected luminosity of 10^42 ergs/s for an
M=10M_sun black hole, a neutron star with a B-field of 10^12 G, and an orbital
velocity ~0.5c at a distance of 3M from the horizon. Larger black holes provide
less power for binary separations at a fixed number of gravitational radii. The
black hole/neutron star system therefore has a significant power supply to
light up various elements in the circuit possibly powering jets, beamed
radiation, or even a hot spot on the neutron star crust.Comment: Published in Physical Review D:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.06405
An analytic solution for weak-field Schwarzschild geodesics
It is well known that the classical gravitational two-body problem can be transformed into a spherical harmonic oscillator by regularization. We find that a modification of the regularization transformation has a similar result to leading order in general relativity. In the resulting harmonic oscillator, the leading-order relativistic perturbation is formally a negative centrifugal force. The net centrifugal force changes sign at 3 Schwarzschild radii, which interestingly mimics the innermost stable circular orbit of the full Schwarzschild problem. Transforming the harmonic-oscillator solution back to spatial coordinates yields, for both time-like and null weak-field Schwarzschild geodesics, a solution for t, r, Ï• in terms of elementary functions of a variable that can be interpreted as a generalized eccentric anomaly. The textbook expressions for relativistic precession and light deflection are easily recovered. We suggest how this solution could be combined with additional perturbations into numerical methods suitable for applications such as relativistic accretion or dynamics of the Galactic Centre star
Observational Signatures of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
Despite solid theoretical and observational grounds for the pairing of
supermassive black holes (SMBHs) after galaxy mergers, definitive evidence for
the existence of close (sub-parsec) separation SMBH binaries (SMBHBs)
approaching merger is yet to be found. This chapter reviews techniques aimed at
discovering such SMBHBs in galactic nuclei. We motivate the search with a brief
overview of SMBHB formation and evolution, and the gaps in our present-day
theoretical understanding. We then present existing observational evidence for
SMBHBs and discuss ongoing efforts to provide definitive evidence for a
population at sub-parsec orbital separations, where many of the aforementioned
theoretical gaps lie. We conclude with future prospects for discovery with
electromagnetic (primarily time-domain) surveys, high-resolution imaging
experiments, and low-frequency gravitational-wave detectors.Comment: To appear in Chapter 5 in the book Black Holes in the Era of
Gravitational Wave Astronomy, ed. Arca Sedda, Bortolas, Spera, pub. Elsevier.
All authors equally contributed to the Chapter writin
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