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Multiband light curves from eccentric accreting supermassive black hole binaries

John Ryan Westernacher-Schneider1,*, Jonathan Zrake1, Andrew MacFadyen2, and Zoltán Haiman3

  • 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634, USA
  • 2Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Physics Department, New York University, New York, New York 10003, USA
  • 3Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

  • *Corresponding author. wester5@clemson.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 106, 103010 – Published 8 November, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.103010

Abstract

We use long-run, high-resolution hydrodynamics simulations to compute the multiwavelength light curves (LCs) from thermal disk emission around accreting equal-mass supermassive black hole (BH) binaries, with a focus on revealing binary eccentricity. LCs are obtained by modeling the disk thermodynamics with an adiabatic equation of state, a local blackbody cooling prescription, and corrections to approximate the effects of radiation pressure. We find that modulation of multiband LCs on the orbital time scale are generally in phase (to within ∼2% of a binary orbital period), but they contain pulse substructure in the time domain that is not necessarily reflected in BH accretion rates M˙. We thus predict that binary-hosting active galactic nucleus (AGN) will exhibit highly correlated, in-phase, periodic brightness modulations in their low-energy disk emission. However, detectability of these modulations in multiwavelength observing campaigns could be compromised because observed stochastic variability in AGNs typically has a higher amplitude than our proposed signal. It is possible that observations over temporal baselines of many binary periods may make the signal more prominent, but this would need to be analyzed carefully. If jet emission is predicted by M˙, then we predict a weaker correlation with low-energy disk emission due to the differing subpeak structure. For the binary parameters we explore, we show that LC variability due to hydrodynamics likely dominates Doppler brightening for all equal-mass binaries with disk Mach numbers ≲20. A promising signature of eccentricity is weak or absent “lump” periodicity. We find hints that a significant lag exists between M˙ and low-energy disk emission for circular binaries, but they are in phase for eccentric binaries, which might explain some “orphan” blazar flares with no γ-ray counterpart.

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Phys. Rev. D 106, 103010– Published 8 November, 2022
  • Received 28 December 2021
  • Accepted 17 October 2022
Article part of CHORUS
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