2011/07/31 by Marcelo Ponce, Joshua A. Faber, James C. Lombardi +1 · 17 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Accretion disc #Active galactic nucleus #Amplitude #Angular momentum #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black hole (networking) #Gravitation #Intermediate-mass black hole #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Rotating black hole #Spin-flip #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/745/1/71
published in The Astrophysical Journal 745(1), 71 (IOP Publishing) · Movies available as 'ancillary files'. Accepted for publication in ApJ
arxiv created 2011/12/19 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/29 · arxiv updated 2015/03/19 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Numerical calculations of merging black hole binaries indicate that asymmetric emission of gravitational radiation can kick the merged black hole at up to thousands of km s −1 , and a number of systems have been observed recently whose properties are consistent with an active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole moving with substantial velocity with respect to its broader accretion disk. We study here the effect of an impulsive kick delivered to a black hole on the dynamical evolution of its accretion disk using a smoothed particle hydrodynamics code, focusing attention on the role played by the kick angle with respect to the orbital angular momentum vector of the pre-kicked disk. We find that for more vertical kicks, for which the angle between the kick and the normal vector to the disk θ ≲ 30°, a gap remains present in the inner disk, in accordance with the prediction from an analytic collisionless Keplerian disk model, while for more oblique kicks with θ ≳ 45°, matter rapidly accretes toward the black hole. There is a systematic trend for higher potential luminosities for more oblique kick angles for a given black hole mass, disk mass, and kick velocity, and we find large amplitude oscillations in time in the case of a kick oriented 60° from the vertical.