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Meet the parents: the progenitor binary for the supermassive black hole candidate in E1821+643 (2210.03267v2)

Published 7 Oct 2022 in astro-ph.GA and astro-ph.HE

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 $2.6 \times 109 \text{ M}_{\odot}$ 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.

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