Fully General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Accretion Flows onto Spinning Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers

Understand

We perform the first suite of fully general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of spinning massive black hole binary mergers.

• We consider binary black holes with spins of different magnitudes aligned to the orbital angular momentum, which are immersed in a hot, magnetized gas cloud.
• We investigate the effect of the spin and degree of magnetization (defined through the fluid parameter $\beta^{-1}\equiv p_{\mathrm{mag}}/p_{\mathrm{fluid}}$) on the properties of the accretion flow.
• We find that magnetized accretion flows are characterized by more turbulent dynamics, as the magnetic field lines are twisted and compressed during the late inspiral.