A new route towards merging massive black holes

With recent advances in gravitational-wave astronomy, the direct detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two stellar-mass compact objects has become a realistic prospect. Evolutionary scenarios towards mergers of various double compact objects generally invoke so-called common-envelope evolution, which is poorly understood and leads to large uncertainties in the predicted merger rates. Here we explore, as an alternative, the scenario of massive overcontact binary (MOB) evolution, which involves two very massive stars in a very tight binary that remain fully mixed as a result of their tidally induced high spin. While many of these systems merge early on, we find many MOBs that swap mass several…

• IR
  Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
• SA
  Science and Technology Facilities Council

  Award: ST/N000919/1