Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 780, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/780/2/164
Keywords
black hole physics; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: kinematics and dynamics; galaxies: nuclei; methods: numerical
Categories
Funding
- Chinese Academy of Sciences through the Silk Road Project at NAOC
- Chinese Academy of Sciences through Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists [2009S1 - 5]
- Chinese Academy of Sciences through Qianren special foreign experts program of China
- Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPA) in Garching
- University of Heidelberg [SFB881]
- European Gravitational Wave Observatory (EGO), VESF grant [EGO-DIR-50-2010]
- Ministry of Finance of People's Republic of China [ZDYZ2008 - 2]
- Volkswagen Foundation [I/80041-043, I/84678/84680]
- Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany [823.219-439/30, 823.219-439/36]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Collaborative Research Center [SFB 881]
- Julich Supercomputing Center (JSC)
- NASU under the Main Astronomical Observatory GRID/GPU computing cluster project
- Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation through the PPGF fellowship
- Peking University One Hundred Talent Fund [985]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [11010237, 11050110414, 11173004]
- John Templeton Foundation
- National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences
- University of Chicago
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The hierarchical galaxy formation picture suggests that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) observed in galactic nuclei today have grown from coalescence of massive black hole binaries (MBHB) after galaxy merging. Once the components of an MBHB become gravitationally bound, strong three-body encounters between the MBHB and stars dominate its evolution in a dry gas-free environment and change the MBHB's energy and angular momentum (semimajor axis, eccentricity, and orientation). Here we present high-accuracy direct N-body simulations of spherical and axisymmetric (rotating) galactic nuclei with order of 106 stars and two MBHs that are initially unbound. We analyze the properties of the ejected stars due to slingshot effects from three-body encounters with the MBHB in detail. Previous studies have investigated the eccentricity and energy changes of MBHs using approximate models or Monte Carlo three-body scatterings. We find general agreement with the average results of previous semi-analytic models for spherical galactic nuclei, but our results show a large statistical variation. Our new results show many more phase space details of how the process works, and also show the influence of stellar system rotation on the process. We detect that the angle between the orbital plane of the MBHBs and that of the stellar system (when it rotates) influences the phase-space properties of the ejected stars. We also find that MBHBs tend to switch stars with counter-rotating orbits into corotating orbits during their interactions.
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