Misaligned Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers in Hot Magnetized Plasma

Understand

We present general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of equal-mass spinning black hole binary mergers embedded in a magnetized gas cloud.

• We focus on the effect of the spin orientation relative to the orbital angular momentum on the flow dynamics, mass accretion rate and Poynting luminosity.
• We find that, across the inspiral, the gas accreting onto the individual black holes concentrates into disk-like overdensities, whose angular momenta are oriented towards the spin axes and which persist until merger.
• We identify quasi-periodic modulations occurring in the mass accretion rate at the level of 1-20%, evolving in parallel with the gravitational wave chirp.