The Co-Evolution of Merging Supermassive Black Hole Binaries and Their Accretion Disks: Emission Models and Prospects for Detection

摘要: Supermassive black hole binaries are expected to form and coalesce throughout cosmic time. The prospects of detecting a merger of two supermassive black holes have never been better. Recent breakthroughs in numerical relativity have made possible precise predictions for the gravitational-wave signature of coalescence; and the planned space-based detector LISA is expected to measure this signature with extremely high fidelity. If the coalescence event also has a detectable electromagnetic signature, eg from the interaction of the rapidly merging binary with the surrounding gas, then identifying this emission together with the gravitational-wave observation will allow cosmological studies by identifying the source redshift. Such a concomitant observation would also present a unique opportunity to study the accretion flows around black holes whose masses and spins are precisely known. I will discuss a simple …