Journal article
THE CLOSE STELLAR COMPANIONS to INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLES
M MacLeod, M Trenti, E Ramirez-Ruiz
Astrophysical Journal | Published : 2016
Abstract
When embedded in dense cluster cores, intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) acquire close stellar or stellar-remnant companions. These companions are not only gravitationally bound, but also tend to hierarchically isolate from other cluster stars through series of multibody encounters. In this paper we study the demographics of IMBH companions in compact star clusters through direct N-body simulations. We study clusters initially composed of 105 or 2 ×105 stars with IMBHs of 75 and 150 solar masses, and we follow their evolution for 6-10 Gyr. A tight, innermost binary pair of IMBH and stellar object rapidly forms. The IMBH has a companion with an orbital semimajor axis at least three times t..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Sverre Aarseth for many guiding conversations and advice on the inclusion of IMBHs and new diagnostics in star cluster simulations with NBODY6; we are lucky to have this fantastic code resource at our disposal. We thank the participants of the Stellar N-body Dynamics conference in Sexten, Italy, for helpful questions and discussion. We are grateful to Melvyn Davies, Shawfeng Dong, Jacqueline Goldstein, James Guillochon, Phillip Macias, Michela Mapelli, Cole Miller, Jill Naiman, Martin Rees, Johan Samsing, Mario Spera, Rainer Spurzem, Luca Zampieri, and Brunetto Ziosi for advice and helpful conversations. We thank the anonymous referee for constructive and useful feedback. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013). The simulations for this research were carried out on the UCSC supercomputer Hyades, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (award number AST-1229745) and UCSC. M.M. is grateful for the support of the Chancellor's Fellowship at UCSC. E.R.-R. acknowledges financial support from the Packard Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and NASA ATP grant NNX14AH37G.