TY - JOUR
T1 - Predicting the binary black hole population of the Milky Way with cosmological simulations
AU - Lamberts, A.
AU - Garrison-Kimmel, S.
AU - Hopkins, P. F.
AU - Quataert, E.
AU - Bullock, J. S.
AU - Faucher-Giguère, C. A.
AU - Wetzel, A.
AU - Kereş, D.
AU - Drango, K.
AU - Sanderson, R. E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Astrid Lamberts would like to thank V. Ravi, H. Vedantham, M. Heida, C. Henderson, Y. Shvarzvald, S. Novati, and S. Taylor for discussions about observational implications of this work and D. Clausen for his help with the BPS models. Numerical calculations were run on the Caltech compute cluster 'Wheeler, ' allocations from XSEDE TG-AST130039nd PRAC NSF.1713353 supported by the NSF, and NASA HEC SMD-16-7592. Support for AL and PFH was provided by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NASA ATP Grant NNX14AH35G, and NSF Collaborative Research Grant 1715847 and CAREER grant 1455342. Support for SGK was provided by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF5-160136 awarded by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060. EQ was supported in part by NSF grant AST-1715070 and a Simons InvestigatorAward from the Simons Foundation. JSBwas supported by NSF grant AST-1518291 and by NASA through HST theory grants ( programmes AR-13921, AR-13888, and AR-14282.001) awarded by STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1412836, AST-1517491, AST-1715216, and CAREER award AST-1652522 and byNASAtrough grant NXX-15AB22G.AWwas supported by NASA through grants HST-GO-14734 and HST-AR-15057 from STScI. DK acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1412153 and AST-1715101 and the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. RES was supported by an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under grant AST-1400989. This study was initiated during K. Drango's 'Freshman Summer Research Internship', organized by the Caltech Center for Diversity. We thank Kacper Kowalik and the whole yt hub team where our dataset is hosted. It is supported in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Data Drive Discovery Initiative through grantGBMF4561 to MatthewTurk and the National Science Foundation under Grant number ACI-1535651
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
PY - 2018/10
Y1 - 2018/10
N2 - Binary black holes are the primary endpoint of massive stars. Their properties provide a unique opportunity to constrain binary evolution, which remains poorly understood. We predict the main properties of binary black holes and their merger products in/around the Milky Way. We present the first combination of a high-resolution cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy with a binary population synthesis model in this context. The hydrodynamic simulation, taken from the FIRE project, provides a cosmologically realistic star formation history for the galaxy, its stellar halo, and satellites. During post-processing, we apply a metallicity-dependent evolutionary model to the star particles to produce individual binary black holes. We find that 7 × 105 binary black holes have merged in the model Milky Way, and 1.2 × 106 binaries are still present, with a mean mass of 28M⊙. Because the black hole progenitors are strongly biased towards low-metallicity stars, half reside in the stellar halo and satellites and a third were formed outside the main galaxy. The numbers and mass distribution of the merged systems is broadly compatible with the LIGO/Virgo detections. Our simplified binary evolution models predict that LISA will detect more than 20 binary black holes, but that electromagnetic observations will be challenging. Our method will allow for constraints on the evolution of massive binaries based on comparisons between observations of compact objects and the predictions of varying binary evolution models. We provide online data of our star formation model and binary black hole distribution.
AB - Binary black holes are the primary endpoint of massive stars. Their properties provide a unique opportunity to constrain binary evolution, which remains poorly understood. We predict the main properties of binary black holes and their merger products in/around the Milky Way. We present the first combination of a high-resolution cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy with a binary population synthesis model in this context. The hydrodynamic simulation, taken from the FIRE project, provides a cosmologically realistic star formation history for the galaxy, its stellar halo, and satellites. During post-processing, we apply a metallicity-dependent evolutionary model to the star particles to produce individual binary black holes. We find that 7 × 105 binary black holes have merged in the model Milky Way, and 1.2 × 106 binaries are still present, with a mean mass of 28M⊙. Because the black hole progenitors are strongly biased towards low-metallicity stars, half reside in the stellar halo and satellites and a third were formed outside the main galaxy. The numbers and mass distribution of the merged systems is broadly compatible with the LIGO/Virgo detections. Our simplified binary evolution models predict that LISA will detect more than 20 binary black holes, but that electromagnetic observations will be challenging. Our method will allow for constraints on the evolution of massive binaries based on comparisons between observations of compact objects and the predictions of varying binary evolution models. We provide online data of our star formation model and binary black hole distribution.
KW - Binaries: close
KW - Galaxy: stellar content
KW - Gravitational waves
KW - Stars: black holes -Galaxy: abundances
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/sty2035
DO - 10.1093/mnras/sty2035
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85054270871
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 480
SP - 2704
EP - 2718
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 2
ER -