We thank A. Antoni, M. MacLeod, R. Rafikov, J. Stone, and Z. Zhu for fruitful discussions and guidance. We thank the referee for their thorough review, which significantly improved the quality of our manuscript. The UCSC team is supported in part by the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity at UCSC, and the National Science Foundation (AST-2307710, AST-2206243, AST-1911206, DGE-1842400, and AST-1852393). This work was supported by NASA Astrophysics Theory Program grant 80NSSC18K1018. The authors acknowledge use of the lux supercomputer at UC Santa Cruz, funded by NSF MRI grant AST 1828315. X.H. is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. S.W.D. acknowledges funding from the Virginia Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (VITA), supported by the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. This work used the computational resources provided by the Advanced Research Computing Services (ARCS) at the University of Virginia. This work used Stampede 2 at Texas Advanced Computing Center through allocation AST150042 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants 2138259, 2138286, 2138307, 2137603, and 2138296.
Disk Draining in LIGO Progenitor Black Hole Binaries and Its Significance to Electromagnetic Counterparts
Abstract
The effect of tidal forces on transport within a relic accretion disk in binary black holes is studied here with a suite of two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. As the binary contracts owing to the emission of gravitational waves, the accretion disk is truncated, and a two-armed spiral wave is excited, which remains stationary in the rotating reference frame of the coalescing binary. Such spiral waves lead to increased transport of mass and angular momentum. Our findings suggest that even in the case of weakly ionized accretion disks spiral density waves will drain the disk long before the orbit of the two black holes decays enough for them to merge, thus dimming prospects for a detectable electromagnetic counterpart.
Copyright and License
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
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Additional details
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity -
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2307710
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2206243
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1911206
- National Science Foundation
- DGE-1842400
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1852393
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC18K1018
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1828315
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- University of Virginia
- Virginia Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (VITA)
- National Science Foundation
- AST150042
- National Science Foundation
- 2138259
- National Science Foundation
- 2138286
- National Science Foundation
- 2138307
- National Science Foundation
- 2137603
- National Science Foundation
- 2138296
- Accepted
-
2025-02-27Accepted
- Available
-
2025-03-13Published
- Caltech groups
- Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published