Low-frequency gravitational-wave experiments such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and pulsar timing arrays are expected to detect individual massive black hole (MBH) binaries and mergers. However, secure methods of identifying the exact host galaxy of each MBH merger among the large number of galaxies in the gravitational-wave localization region are currently lacking. We investigate the distinct morphological signatures of MBH merger host galaxies, using the Romulus25 cosmological simulation. We produce mock telescope images of 201 simulated galaxies in Romulus25 hosting recent MBH mergers through stellar population synthesis and dust radiative transfer. Based on comparisons to mass- and redshift-matched control samples, we show that combining multiple morphological statistics via a linear discriminant analysis enables identification of the host galaxies of MBH mergers, with accuracies that increase with chirp mass and mass ratio. For mergers with high chirp masses (≳108.2M⊙) and high mass ratios (≳0.5), the accuracy of this approach reaches ≳80%, and does not decline for at least ∼1 Gyr after numerical merger. We argue that these trends arise because the most distinctive morphological characteristics of MBH merger and binary host galaxies are prominent classical bulges, rather than relatively short-lived morphological disturbances from their preceding galaxy mergers. Since these bulges are formed though major mergers of massive galaxies, they lead to (and become permanent signposts for) MBH binaries and mergers that have high chirp masses and mass ratios. Our results suggest that galaxy morphology can aid in identifying the host galaxies of future MBH binaries and mergers.
Signatures of Massive Black Hole Merger Host Galaxies from Cosmological Simulations. I. Unique Galaxy Morphologies in Imaging
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We thank Thomas R. Quinn, Jessie Runnoe, Stephen Taylor, Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, and Maria Charisi for insightful discussions.
This work made extensive use of the Cedar 5 cluster of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada 6 at Simon Fraser University.
Romulus25 is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
J.B. acknowledges support from the NSERC Summer Undergraduate Research Award program. J.J.R. and D.H. acknowledge support from the Canada Research Chairs program, the NSERC Discovery Grant program, the FRQNT Nouveaux Chercheurs Grant program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. J.J.R. acknowledges funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Québec Ministère de l'Économie et de l'Innovation. M.T. was supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-2001810.
Software References
Powderday 7 (Narayanan et al. 2021), Pynbody 8 (Pontzen et al. 2013), Tangos 9 (Pontzen & Tremmel 2018), Hyperion 10 (Robitaille 2011), yt 11 (Turk et al. 2011), FSPS 12 (Conroy & Gunn 2010), StatMorph 13 (Rodriguez-Gomez et al. 2019), sklearn 14 (Pedregosa et al. 2011), ChaNGa 15 (Menon et al. 2015), Amiga Halo Finder 16 (Knollmann & Knebe 2009), and astropy 17 (Astropy Collaboration et al. (2018)
Files
Bardati_2024_ApJ_961_34.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-0725070
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-1238993
- Canada Research Chairs
- 2020-00166
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
- RGPIN-2021-02723
- Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- Government of Quebec
- Ministère de l'Économie et de l'Innovation
- National Science Foundation
- NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship AST-2001810