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Massive Black-Hole Mergers

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Handbook of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Abstract

At low redshift, massive black holes are found in the centers of almost all large elliptical galaxies, and also in many lower-mass systems. Their evolution is believed to be inextricably entangled with that of their host galaxies. On the one hand, the galactic environment provides gas for the black holes to grow via accretion and shine as active galactic nuclei. On the other hand, massive black holes are expected to backreact on the galactic dynamics, by injecting energy in their surroundings via jets or radiative feedback. Moreover, if galaxies and dark-matter halos form hierarchically, from small systems at high redshift coalescing into larger ones at more recent epochs, massive black holes may also merge, potentially generating gravitational-wave signals detectable by present and future experiments. In this chapter, we discuss the predictions of current astrophysical models for the mergers of massive black holes in the mHz frequency band of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and in the nHz frequency band of pulsar-timing array experiments. We focus in particular on the astrophysical uncertainties affecting these predictions, including the poorly known dynamical evolution of massive black-hole pairs at separations of hundreds of parsecs, the possible formation of “stalled” binaries at parsec separations (“final-parsec problem”), and the effect of baryonic physics (e.g., SN feedback) on the growth of massive black holes. We show that nHz-band predictions are much more robust than in the mHz band and comment on the implications of this fact for LISA and pulsar-timing arrays.

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Acknowledgements

E.B. acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “GRavity from Astrophysical to Microscopic Scales” grant agreement no. GRAMS-815673. E.B. thanks I. Dvorkin, M. Bonetti, M. Tremmel, and M. Volonteri for numerous insightful conversations on the astrophysics of galaxies and black holes and for agreeing to adapting the figures of [9]. A.L. acknowledges financial support from the EU H2020-MSCAITN-2019 Project 860744 “BiD4BEST: Big Data applications for Black hole Evolution STudies” and from the PRIN MIUR 2017 prot. 20173ML3WW 002, “Opening the ALMA window on the cosmic evolution of gas, stars and massive black holes.” We thank J. Gonzalez for proofreading this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Trieste, Italy

    Enrico Barausse & Andrea Lapi

  2. IFPU – Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, Trieste, Italy

    Enrico Barausse & Andrea Lapi

  3. INFN-Sezione di Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Enrico Barausse & Andrea Lapi

  4. INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Andrea Lapi

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  1. Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Cosimo Bambi

  2. Université Paris Denis Diderot, Paris, France

    Stavros Katsanevas

  3. Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Konstantinos D. Kokkotas

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  1. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Valeria Ferrari

  2. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Leonardo Gualtieri

  3. Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Kostantinos D. Kokkotas

  4. Theoretisch-Physikalisches Institut, Universität Jena, Jena, Germany

    Gerhard Schaefer

  5. Professor of Theoretical Physics, King's College London, University of London, London, U.K.

    Mairi Sakellariadou

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Barausse, E., Lapi, A. (2021). Massive Black-Hole Mergers. In: Bambi, C., Katsanevas, S., Kokkotas, K.D. (eds) Handbook of Gravitational Wave Astronomy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4702-7_18-1

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