Ultramassive Black Hole Coalescence

TL;DR

This study uses N-body simulations to explore the rapid coalescence of ultramassive black hole binaries in galactic mergers, revealing a swift evolution dominated by dynamical friction and gravitational waves.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation-based analysis of ultramassive black hole mergers, showing they rapidly coalesce with minimal three-body scattering phases.

Findings

Black hole binaries form within ~10 Myr in ultramassive galaxy mergers.

Coalescence occurs in a few Myr dominated by gravitational wave emission.

Merger remnants are axisymmetric centrally, triaxial at larger radii.

Abstract

Although supermassive black holes (SMBHs) correlate well with their host galaxies, there is an emerging view that outliers exist. Henize 2-10, NGC 4889, and NGC1277 are examples of SMBHs at least an order of magnitude more massive than their host galaxy suggests. The dynamical effects of such ultramassive central black holes is unclear. Here, we perform direct N-body simulations of mergers of galactic nuclei where one black hole is ultramassive to study the evolution of the remnant and the black hole dynamics in this extreme regime. We find that the merger remnant is axisymmetric near the center, while near the large SMBH influence radius, the galaxy is triaxial. The SMBH separation shrinks rapidly due to dynamical friction, and quickly forms a binary black hole; if we scale our model to the most massive estimate for the NGC1277 black hole, for example, the timescale for the SMBH separation to shrink from nearly a kiloparsec to less than a parsec is roughly 10 Myr. By the time the SMBHs form a hard binary, gravitational wave emission dominates, and the black holes coalesce in a mere few Myr. Curiously, these extremely massive binaries appear to nearly bypass the 3-body scattering evolutionary phase. Our study suggests that in this extreme case, SMBH coalescence is governed by dynamical friction followed nearly directly by gravitational wave emission, resulting in an rapid and efficient SMBH coalescence timescale. We discuss the implications for gravitational wave event rates and hypervelocity star production.