Published February 15, 2010 | Version v1
Journal article

Post-merger electromagnetic emissions from disks perturbed by binary black holes

  • 1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803-4001 (United States)
  • 2. CIFAR, Cosmology and Gravity Program, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1Z8 (Canada)
  • 3. Department of Physics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1 (Canada)
  • 4. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5 (Canada)
  • 5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602 (United States)

Description

We simulate the possible emission from a disk perturbed by a recoiling supermassive black hole. To this end, we study radiation transfer from the system incorporating bremsstrahlung emission from a Maxwellian plasma and absorption given by Kramer's opacity law modified to incorporate blackbody effects. We employ this model in the radiation transfer integration to compute the luminosity at several frequencies, and compare with previous bremsstrahlung luminosity estimations from a transparent limit (in which the emissivity is integrated over the computational domain and over all frequencies) and with a simple thermal emission model. We find close agreement between the radiation transfer results and the estimated bremsstrahlung luminosity from previous work for electromagnetic signals above 1014 Hz. For lower frequencies, we find a self-eclipsing behavior in the disk, resulting in a strong intensity variability connected to the orbital period of the disk.

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
Journal Volume
81
Journal Issue
4
Journal Page Range
p. 044004-044004.8
ISSN
0556-2821
CODEN
PRVDAQ

Optional Information

Notes
(c) 2010 The American Physical Society