Electromagnetic Precursors to Black Hole–Neutron Star Gravitational Wave Events: Flares and Reconnection-powered Fast Radio Transients from the Late Inspiral
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
The presence of magnetic fields in the late inspiral of black hole–neutron star binaries could lead to potentially detectable electromagnetic precursor transients. Using general-relativistic force-free electrodynamics simulations, we investigate premerger interactions of the common magnetosphere of black hole–neutron star systems. We demonstrate that these systems can feature copious electromagnetic flaring activity, which we find depends on the magnetic field orientation but not on black hole spin. Due to interactions with the surrounding magnetosphere, these flares could lead to fast-radio-burst-like transients and X-ray emission, with LEM≲1041(B∗/1012G)2ergs−1 as an upper bound on the luminosity, where B* is the magnetic field strength on the surface of the neutron star.
Copyright and License
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for discussions with Benoit Cerutti, Sean McWilliams, and Navin Sridhar. E.R.M. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-2307394. A.P. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1909458. This work was initiated during visits at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611, and at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics in Providence, RI, which is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. DMS-1929284. This research was facilitated by the Multimessenger Plasma Physics Center (MPPC), NSF grant PHY-2206610. The simulations were performed on the NSF Frontera supercomputer under grant AST21006. E.R.M. acknowledges the use of Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296. Support also comes from the Resnick High Performance Computing Center, a facility supported by Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology.
Software References
AMReX (Zhang et al. 2019), FUKA (Papenfort et al. 2021), Kadath (Grandclement 2010), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), numpy (Harris et al. 2020), and scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020).
Files
Most_2023_ApJL_956_L33.pdf
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Additional details
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2307394
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1909458
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1607611
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2206610
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
Dates
- Accepted
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2023-09-27Accepted
- Available
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2023-10-16Published online