Kilonova emission from black hole-neutron star mergers: observational signatures of anisotropic mass ejection

TL;DR

This paper explores how the anisotropic mass ejection in black hole-neutron star mergers affects kilonova emission, revealing distinctive observational signatures that can help distinguish these events from neutron star mergers.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of observational signatures caused by anisotropic ejecta in BH-NS mergers, highlighting features like luminosity bumps and spectral deviations.

Findings

Luminosity bump due to inhomogeneous ejecta distribution

Flatter decay slope in single-band light curves

Spectral deviations from blackbody radiation

Abstract

The gravitational wave event GW170817 associated with the short gamma-ray burst (GRB) 170817A confirms that binary neutron star (BNS) mergers are one of the origins of short GRBs. The associated kilonova emission, radioactively powered by nucleosynthesized heavy elements, was also detected. Black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers have been argued to be another promising origin candidate of short GRBs and kilonovae. Numerical simulations show that the ejecta in BH-NS mergers is geometrically much more anisotropic than the BNS merger case. In this paper, we investigate observational signatures of kilonova emission from the anisotropic ejecta in BH-NS mergers. We find that a bump appears on the bolometric luminosity light curve due to the inhomogeneous mass distribution in the latitudinal direction. The decay slope of the single-band light curve becomes flatter and the spectrum also deviates from a single-temperature blackbody radiation spectrum due to the gradient in the velocity distribution of the ejecta. Future detection or non-detection of such signatures would be useful to test the mass ejection geometry in BH-NS mergers.