Meet the parents: the progenitor binary for the supermassive black hole candidate in E1821+643

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of the progenitor binary black hole system that led to the recoiling supermassive black hole E1821+643, revealing high spins and a likely gas-rich merger environment.

Contribution

It infers the masses, spins, and environmental conditions of the binary black hole progenitor of E1821+643 using astrophysical priors and recoil velocity analysis.

Findings

Progenitor black holes had masses around 10^9 solar masses.

Black holes were likely rapidly spinning with high spin magnitudes.

E1821+643's high recoil velocity suggests a merger in a hot gas environment.

Abstract

The remnants of binary black hole mergers can be given recoil kick velocities up to $5,000\text{ km s$^{-1}$}$ due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves. E1821+643 is a recoiling supermassive black hole moving at $\sim 2,100\text{ km s$^{-1}$}$ along the line-of-sight relative to its host galaxy. This suggests a recoil kick of $\sim 2,240\text{ km s$^{-1}$}$. Such a kick is powerful enough to eject E1821+643 from its $M_\text{gal}\sim 2 \times 10^{12}\text{ M}_{\odot}$ host galaxy. In this work, we address the question: what are the likely properties of the progenitor binary that formed E1821+643? Using astrophysically motivated priors, we infer that E1821+643 was likely formed from a binary black hole system with masses of $m_1\sim 1.9^{+5.0}_{-3.8}\times 10^{9}\text{ M}_{\odot}$, $m_2\sim 8.1^{+3.9}_{-3.2} \times 10^{8}\text{ M}_{\odot}$ (90\% credible intervals). The black holes in this binary were likely to be spinning rapidly with dimensionless spin magnitudes of ${\chi}_1 = 0.87^{+0.11}_{-0.26}$, ${\chi}_2 = 0.77^{+0.19}_{-0.37}$. Such a high recoil velocity is impossible for spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum axis. This suggest that E1821+643 merged in hot gas, which is thought to provide an environment where spin alignment from accretion proceeds slowly relative to the merger timescale. We infer that E1821+643 is likely to be rapidly rotating with dimensionless spin ${\chi} = 0.92\pm0.04$. A $2.6 \times 10^9 \text{ M}_{\odot}$ black hole, recoiling from a gas-rich environment at $v\sim 2,240\text{ km s$^{-1}$}$ is likely to persist as an active galactic nuclei for $\sim 860$ Myr, in which time it traverses $\sim 2$ Mpc.