Blindly detecting orbital modulations of jets from merging supermassive black holes

Abstract

In the last few years before merger, supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries will rapidly inspiral and precess in a magnetic field imposed by a surrounding circumbinary disk. Multiple simulations suggest that this relative motion will convert some of the local energy to a Poynting-dominated outflow, with a luminosity 1043 erg s-1 (B/104 G) 2(M/108 M)2(v/0.4c)2, some of which may emerge as synchrotron emission at frequencies near 1GHz where current and planned wide-field radio surveys will operate. On top of a secular increase in power (and v) on the gravitational wave inspiral timescale, orbital motion will produce significant, detectable modulations, both on orbital periods and (if black hole spins are not aligned with the binary's total angular momenta) spin-orbit precession timescales. Because the gravitational wave merger time increases rapidly with separation, we find that vast numbers of these transients are ubiquitously predicted, unless explicitly ruled out (by low efficiency ε) or obscured (by accretion geometry f geo). If the fraction of Poynting flux converted to radio emission times the fraction of lines of sight accessible f geo is sufficiently large (f geoε > 2 × 10-4 for a 1 year orbital period), at least one event is accessible to future blind surveys at a nominal 104 deg2 with 0.5 mJy sensitivity. Our procedure generalizes to other flux-limited surveys designed to investigate electromagnetic (EM) signatures associated with many modulations produced by merging SMBH binaries. © 2011. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.