Dual Jets from Binary Black Holes

Abstract

When Black Holes Collide When galaxies merge, their central black holes interact, initially coming together in a binary system and eventually coalescing into one single black hole. The dynamics of orbiting binary black holes in vacuum is well understood; however, when black holes merge, their accretion disks are expected to combine into a circumbinary disk anchoring a magnetic field. Numerical simulations from Palenzuela et al. (p. 927 ; see the Perspective by Yunes ) now show that when this surrounding environment is taken into account, the black holes effectively stir the plasma that surrounds them, generating collimated beams of electromagnetic radiation that then transition to a single jet as the black holes merge due to the emission of gravitational waves.