GW 150914-like black holes as Galactic high-energy sources

Kunihito Ioka, Tatsuya Matsumoto, Yuto Teraki, Kazumi Kashiyama, Kohta Murase

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

The first direct detections of gravitational waves (GWs) from black hole (BH) mergers, GW 150914, GW 151226 and LVT 151012, give a robust lower limit ~70 000 -61 000+170 000 on the number of merged, highly spinning BHs in our Galaxy. The total spin energy is comparable to all the kinetic energy of supernovae that ever happened in our Galaxy. The BHs release the spin energy to relativistic jets by accreting matter and magnetic fields from the interstellar medium (ISM). By considering the distributions of the ISM density, BHmass and velocity, we calculate the luminosity function of the BH jets, and find that they can potentially accelerate TeV-PeV cosmic ray particles in our Galaxy with total power ~1037 ± 3 erg s-1 as PeVatrons, positron factories and/or unidentified TeV gamma-ray sources. Additional ~300 BH jet nebulae could be detectable by Cherenkov Telescope Array. We also argue that the accretion from the ISM can evaporate and blow away cold material around the BH, which has profound implications for some scenarios to predict electromagnetic counterparts to BH mergers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3332-3345
Number of pages14
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume470
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 21 2017

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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