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Published Online August 1, 2002
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1074688

Reports

Submitted on June 4, 2002
Accepted on July 17, 2002

Tracing Black Hole Mergers Through Radio Lobe Morphology

David Merritt 1* R. D. Ekers 2

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08903, USA.
2 Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO, Post Office Box 76, Epping, NSW 2121, Australia; Radio Astronomy Laboratory, 623 Campbell Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: merritt{at}physics.rutgers.edu.

Binary supermassive black holes are produced by galactic mergers as the black holes from the two galaxies fall to the center of the merged system and form a bound pair. The two black holes will eventually coalesce in an enormous burst of gravitational radiation. Here we show that the orientation of a black hole's spin axis would change dramatically even in a minor merger, leading to a sudden flip in the direction of any associated jet. We identify the winged or X-type radio sources with galaxies in which this has occurred. The inferred coalescence rate is similar to the overall galaxy merger rate, implying that of order one merger event per year could be detected by gravitational wave interferometers.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Orbital Motion in the Radio Galaxy 3C 66B: Evidence for a Supermassive Black Hole Binary.
H. Sudou, S. Iguchi, Y. Murata, and Y. Taniguchi (2003)
Science 300, 1263-1265
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)