Realistic Accretion Dynamics of Black Hole Binaries Approaching Merger

Manuela Campanelli, Rochester Institute of Technology

Usage Details

Julian Krolik, Carlos Lousto, Manuela Campanelli, Zachariah Etienne, Scott Noble, Yosef Zlochower, Bruno Giacomazzo, James Healy, Philipp Moesta, Dennis Bowen, Vassilios Mewes, Mark Avara, Brendan Drachler, Federico Lopez Armengol, Brooks Kinch, Ariadna Murguia Berthier, Riccardo Ciolfi, Federico Cipolletta, Luciano Combi

The principal goal is to perform the first credible calculations of the light emitted by nearby gas as two supermassive black holes approach merger.  By so doing, we will give observers strong clues about how to find such systems, potentially identifying examples well before their gravitational wave emission can be detected.  The galactic environment of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBBHs) should, in many cases, supply ample gas to be accreted, liberating large amounts of energy in the process.  In the relativistic  part  of  the  potential,  the  gas  temperature  can  range  from 10 4 –10 10 K,  so  that  it  produces photons spanning the spectrum from visible light to hard X-rays; the power output can be great enough that they can be seen from across the Universe. 

Our simulations will support the first astrophysically-informed predictions of the time- and energy-dependence of the EM precursor to SMBBH merger, and we propose to use the Blue Waters petascale system to accomplish this. The petascale computational resource available through the Blue Waters system is the best available to carry out such an investigation because of its immense size (the number of cores, the available storage, and the potential allocations are all large compared to XSEDE ).

The magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) equations of gas flows near SMBBHs are extremely complicated and petascale numerical simulation is therefore the only tool available to accurately model them.   Furthermore, our main computational toolkit scales well to tens of thousands of cores, and has been tailored to run efficiently on the Blue Waters system through years of use.