Relativistic three-body effects in black hole coalescence
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, University of Texas at Brownsville, 80 Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas 78520 (United States)
Three-body interactions are expected to be common in globular clusters and in galactic cores hosting supermassive black holes. We consider an equal-mass binary black hole system in the presence of a third black hole. Using numerically generated binary black hole initial data sets, and first and second-order post-Newtonian (1PN and 2PN) techniques, we find that the presence of the third black hole has non-negligible relativistic effects on the location of the binary's innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), and that these effects arise at 2PN order. For a stellar-mass black hole binary in orbit about a supermassive black hole, the massive black hole has stabilizing effects on the orbiting binary, leading to an increase in merger time and a decrease of the terminal orbital frequency, and an amplification of the gravitational radiation emitted from the binary system by up to 6%.
- OSTI ID:
- 20871475
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 74, Issue 8; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.74.087503; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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