A new mechanism for massive binary black hole evolution

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel mechanism involving triple disks that enables massive binary black holes to merge within a Hubble time, addressing the final parsec problem by balancing angular momentum transfer.

Contribution

It introduces a new model with triple disks that explains how massive BBHs can overcome the final parsec problem and merge within cosmic timescales.

Findings

The semi-major axis decreases over time under certain mass transfer rates.

Orbital eccentricity increases if the mass transfer rate is below a critical value.

Most massive BBHs can merge within a Hubble time using this mechanism.

Abstract

It is still unknown how the BBH evolves after its semi-major axis reached to the sub-parsec/parsec scale where the dynamical friction with the neighboring stars is no longer effective (the so-called the final parsec problem). In this paper, we propose a new mechanism by which the massive BBH can naturally coalesce within a Hubble time. We study the evolution of the BBH with triple disks which are composed of an accretion disk around each black hole and one circumbinary disk surrounding them. While the circumbinary disk removes the orbital angular momentum of the BBH via the binary-disk resonant interaction, the mass transfer from the circumbinary disk to each black hole adds some fraction of its angular momentum to the orbital angular momentum of the BBH. We find that there is a critical value of the mass-transfer rate where the extraction of the orbital angular momentum from the BBH is balanced with the addition of the orbital angular momentum to the BBH. The semi-major axis of the BBH decays with time whereas the orbital eccentricity of the BBH grows with time, if the mass transfer rate is smaller than the critical one, and vice versa. Its evolutionary timescale is characterized by the product of the viscous timescale of the circumbinary disk and the ratio of the total black hole mass to the mass of the circumbinary disk. Since a minimum value of the critical mass-transfer rate is larger than the Eddington accretion rate of massive black holes with masses in the 10^{6}M_{sun} to $10^{9}M_{sun} range, it is promising that the critical mass-transfer rate is larger than the mass transfer rate. Most of massive BBHs, therefore, enable to merge within a Hubble time by the proposed mechanism, which helps to solve the final parsec problem.