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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Circumbinary Discs Around Merging Stellar-Mass Black Holes, Rebecca G. Martin, Chris Nixon, Fu-Guo Xie, Andrew King
Circumbinary Discs Around Merging Stellar-Mass Black Holes, Rebecca G. Martin, Chris Nixon, Fu-Guo Xie, Andrew King
Physics & Astronomy Faculty Research
A circumbinary disc around a pair of merging stellar-mass black holes may be shocked and heated during the recoil of the merged hole, causing a near-simultaneous electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational wave event. The shocks occur around the recoil radius, where the disc orbital velocity is equal to the recoil velocity. The amount of mass present near this radius at the time of the merger is critical in determining how much radiation is released. We explore the evolution of a circumbinary disc in two limits. First, we consider an accretion disc that feels no torque from the binary. The disc …
Polar Alignment Of A Protoplanetary Disc Around An Eccentric Binary - Ii. Effect Of Binary And Disc Parameters, Rebecca G. Martin, Stephen H. Lubow
Polar Alignment Of A Protoplanetary Disc Around An Eccentric Binary - Ii. Effect Of Binary And Disc Parameters, Rebecca G. Martin, Stephen H. Lubow
Physics & Astronomy Faculty Research
In a recent paper Martin & Lubow showed that a circumbinary disc around an eccentric binary can undergo damped nodal oscillations that lead to the polar (perpendicular) alignment of the disc relative to the binary orbit. The disc angular momentum vector aligns to the eccentricity vector of the binary. We explore the robustness of this mechanism for a low-mass disc (0.001 of the binary mass) and its dependence on system parameters by means of hydrodynamic disc simulations. We describe how the evolution depends upon the disc viscosity, temperature, size, binary mass ratio, orbital eccentricity, and inclination. We compare results with …