Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters and their role in gravitational-wave generation III: dissecting black hole dynamics

Understand

Stellar-remnant black holes (BH) in dense stellar clusters comprise a natural setup to trigger general-relativistic (GR) inspiral and merger of binary black holes (BBH), detectable by the LISA and the LIGO-Virgo, through dynamical encounters inside such environments.

• In this work, the intricacies of such dynamical interactions are probed utilizing realistic, self-consistent, post-Newtonian, direct N-body evolutionary models of young massive and open stellar clusters.
• Particularly, the configurations of the compact subsystems, that drive the in-cluster GR BBH coalescences, are tracked on the fly.
• Such an approach reveals that the GR coalescences within the open clusters take place primarily via chaotic interactions involving triple BH systems.