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Nonlinear Gravitational Recoil from the Mergers of Precessing Black-Hole Binaries
By Carlos O. Lousto Yosef Zlochower
Published in Phys. Rev. D 87, 084027 (Wednesday, November 28, 2012)

Abstract

We present results from an extensive study of 88 precessing, equal-mass black-hole binaries with large spins (83 with intrinsic spins |S⃗i/mi2| of 0.8 and 5 with intrinsic spins of 0.9), and use these data to model new nonlinear contributions to the gravitational recoil imparted to the merged black hole. We find a new effect, the cross kick, that enhances the recoil for partially aligned binaries beyond the hangup kick effect. This has the consequence of increasing the probabilities of recoils larger than 2000  km s-1 by nearly a factor of 2, and consequently, of black holes getting ejected from galaxies, as well as the observation of large differential redshifts/blueshifts in the cores of recently merged galaxies.

Research Areas

Numerical Relativity