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The hunt is on for orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes on the verge of collision, and researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have built a simulation that could lead scientists to them.
The predictive model tells astronomers how to supermassive black hole binaries nearing merger at the center of active galaxies would look like a modern telescope. The gravitational pull drawing the two supermassive black holes together creates violent shocks in surrounding gas producing light in the ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. Because current technology is unable to directly observe the frequency of frequency, it can not be compared to the reality of the problem.
Predicting the characteristic light signals and the timing of their occurrence will help scientists identify these collisions with existing and future telescopes and more understand what is happening to the hearts of most galaxies, according to Manuela Campanelli, director of RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation co-author of the new study.
Findings from the paper, "Electromagnetic emission from supermassive binary black holes approaching merger," appeared in the Oct. 2 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
The study builds on a priori RIT study that suggests three gas disks the light sources: two small companion disk of accreting gas feed each supermassive black hole; and a larger disk that contains the scenario playing out within its boundaries.
The computational model applies multi-messenger astronomy by combining information from light- and gravitational waves and high-energy particles. The mini-movies illustrating the simulation are the first to visualize the effects of Einstein's theory of general relativity on the light and the particles surrounding and passing between supermassive black holes orbiting each other.
"These are really beautiful images," said Stéphane d'Ascoli, first author on the paper and a doctoral student at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. D'Ascoli collaborated with researchers at RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, where he was a visiting scholar and graduate student intern.
"You can see these gravitational lensing and subtle effects we have not expecting, like 'eyebrows,' these secondary images of a black hole created by the way that light passes through the system," said Ascoli.
From Ascoli worked with Campanelli, who had initiated the project nine years ago, and with co-author and post-doctoral fellow Scott Noble, now NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional co-authors on the paper include Dennis Bowen and Vassilios Mewes, Ph.D. students at RIT; and Julian Krolik from Johns Hopkins University.
"Identifying the light signatures from supermassive black hole binaries by some of the many electromagnetic telescopes operating in the field of multimessenger astronomy and sharply refine our estimates of the population and evolution of supermassive black holes space-based gravitational wave observatories, "said Campanelli.
Campanelli's early research was instrumental to the first direct detection of stellar-mass binary black holes and discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration. Mass black holes result from supernovae explosions; supermassive black holes form when galaxies merge and drag along an entourage of gas and dust clouds, stars and planets.
"We know galaxies with central supermassive black holes combines all the time in the universe, yet we only see a small fraction of galaxies with two supermassive black holes near their centers," said Noble. "The ones we do not know about gravitational wave signals because they are too far away from each other. We are after seeing – with light – the close peers, what we call binaries, for the first time. "
Campanelli's team was one of the first to compute the simulate and predict gravitational wave signals from a stellar mass black hole merger to decade before LIGO directly observed the waveforms.
Future observatories like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, led by the European Space Agency, someday, could directly detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes. Ground-based observatories are unable to capture the wavelengths of supermassive black holes. RIT's Center for Computational Relativity is a member of the LISA consortium.
The Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Campanelli's team was recently awarded additional time on Blue Waters to continue developing their models.
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