Black hole pulsars and monster shocks as outcomes of black hole-neutron star mergers
| Autor: | Kim, Yoonsoo, Most, Elias R., Beloborodov, Andrei M., Ripperda, Bart |
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| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| Popis: | The merger of a black hole (BH) and a neutron star (NS) in most cases is expected to leave no material around the remnant BH; therefore, such events are often considered as sources of gravitational waves without electromagnetic counterparts. However, a bright counterpart can emerge if the NS is strongly magnetized, as its external magnetosphere can experience radiative shocks and magnetic reconnection during/after the merger. We use magnetohydrodynamic simulations in the dynamical spacetime of a merging BH-NS binary to investigate its magnetospheric dynamics. We find that the magnetosphere develops compressive waves that steepen into shocks. After swallowing the NS, the BH acquires a magnetosphere that quickly evolves into a split monopole configuration and then undergoes an exponential decay (balding), enabled by magnetic reconnection and also assisted by the ring-down of the remnant BH. This spinning BH drags the split monopole into rotation, forming a transient pulsar-like state. It emits a striped wind if the swallowed magnetic dipole moment is inclined to the spin axis. We predict two types of transients from this scenario: (1) a fast radio burst emitted by the shocks as they expand to large radii and (2) an X/gamma-ray burst emitted by the $e^\pm$ outflow heated by magnetic dissipation. Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, submitted to ApJL |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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