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ABSTRACT The brightest steady sources of radiation in the universe, active galactic nuclei (AGNs), are powered by gas accretion on to a central supermassive black hole (SMBH). The large sizes and accretion rates implicated in AGN accretion discs are expected to lead to gravitational instability and fragmentation, effectively cutting off mass inflow to the SMBH. Radiative feedback from disc-embedded stars has been invoked to yield marginally stable, steady-state solutions in the outer discs. Here, we examine the consequences of this star formation with a semi-analytical model in which stellar-mass black hole (sBH) remnants in the disc provide an additional source of stabilizing radiative feedback. Assuming star formation seeds the embedded sBH population, we model the time-evolving feedback from both stars and the growing population of accreting sBHs. We find that in the outer disc, the luminosity of the sBHs quickly dominates that of their parent stars. However, because sBHs consume less gas than stars to stabilize the disc, the presence of the sBHs enhances the mass flux to the inner disc. As a result, star formation persists over the lifetime of the AGN, damped in the outer disc, but amplified in a narrow ring in the inner disc. Heating from the embedded sBHs significantly modifies the disc’s temperature profile and hardens its spectral energy distribution, and direct emission from the sBHs adds a new hard X-ray component. 

Abstract The astrophysical origin of stellar-mass black hole (BH) mergers discovered through gravitational waves (GWs) is widely debated. Mergers in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) represent promising environments for at least a fraction of these events, with possible observational clues in the GW data. An additional clue to unveil AGN merger environments is provided by possible electromagnetic emission from postmerger accreting BHs. Associated with BH mergers in AGN disks, emission from shocks emerging around jets launched by accreting merger remnants is expected. Here we compute the properties of the emission produced during breakout and the subsequent adiabatic expansion phase of the shocks, and we then apply this model to optical flares suggested to be possibly associated with GW events. We find that the majority of the reported flares can be explained by breakout and shock cooling emission. If the optical flares are produced by shock cooling emission, they would display moderate color evolution, possibly color variations among different events, and a positive correlation between delay time and flare duration and would be preceded by breakout emission in X-rays. If the breakout emission dominates the observed lightcurve, we predict the color to be distributed in a narrow range in the optical band and the delay time from GW to electromagnetic emission to be longer than ∼2 days. Hence, further explorations of delay time distributions, flare color evolution, and associated X-ray emission will be useful to test the proposed emission model for the observed flares. 

Abstract The origin of stellar-mass black hole mergers discovered through gravitational waves is being widely debated. Mergers in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) represent a promising source of origin, with possible observational clues in the gravitational-wave data. Beyond gravitational waves, a unique signature of AGN-assisted mergers is electromagnetic emission from the accreting black holes. Here we show that jets launched by accreting black holes merging in an AGN disk can be detected as peculiar transients by infrared, optical, and X-ray observatories. We further show that this emission mechanism can explain the possible associations between gravitational-wave events and the optical transient ZTF 19abanrhr and the proposed gamma-ray counterparts GW150914-GBM and LVT151012-GBM. We demonstrate how these associations, if genuine, can be used to reconstruct the properties of these events’ environments. Searching for infrared and X-ray counterparts to similar electromagnetic transients in the future, once host galaxies are localized by optical observations, could provide a smoking-gun signature of the mergers’ AGN origin. 

Abstract Stellar-mass black holes (BHs) are predicted to be embedded in the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) due to gravitational drag and in situ star formation. However, clear evidence for AGN disk-embedded BHs is currently lacking. Here, as possible electromagnetic signatures of these BHs, we investigate breakout emission from shocks emerging around Blandford–Znajek jets launched from accreting BHs in AGN disks. We assume that most of the highly super-Eddington flow reaches the BH and produces a strong jet, and the jet produces feedback that shuts off accretion and thus leads to episodic flaring. These assumptions, while poorly understood at present, yield observable consequences that can probe the presence of AGN-embedded BHs as well as the accretion process itself. They predict a breakout emission characterized by luminous thermal emission in the X-ray bands and bright broadband nonthermal emission from the infrared to the gamma-ray bands. The flare duration depends on the BH’s distance r from the central supermassive BH, varying between 10 3 –10 6 s for r ∼ 0.01–1 pc. This emission can be discovered by current and future infrared, optical, and X-ray wide-field surveys and monitoring campaigns of nearby AGNs. 

Abstract Stellar-mass BHs (sBHs) are predicted to be embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks owing to gravitational drag and in situ star formation. However, we find that, due to a high gas density in an AGN disk environment, compact objects may rapidly grow to intermediate-mass BHs and deplete matter from the AGN disk unless accretion is suppressed by some feedback process(es). These consequences are inconsistent with AGN observations and the dynamics of the Galactic center. Here we consider mechanical feedback mechanisms for the reduction of gas accretion. Rapidly accreting sBHs launch winds and/or jets via the Blandford–Znajek mechanism, which produce high-pressure shocks and cocoons. Such a shock and cocoon can spread laterally in the plane of the disk, eject the outer regions of a circum-sBH disk (CsBD), and puncture a hole in the AGN disk with horizontal size comparable to the disk scale height. Since the depletion timescale of the bound CsBD is much shorter than the resupply timescale of gas to the sBH, the time-averaged accretion rate onto sBHs is reduced by this process by a factor of ∼10–100. This feedback mechanism can therefore help alleviate the sBH overgrowth and AGN disk depletion problems. On the other hand, we find that cocoons of jets can unbind a large fraction of the gas accreting in the disks of less massive supermassive BHs (SMBHs), which may help explain the dearth of high-Eddington-ratio AGNs with SMBH mass ≲ 10 5 M ⊙ . 

ABSTRACT Recent gravitational wave (GW) observations by LIGO/Virgo show evidence for hierarchical mergers, where the merging BHs are the remnants of previous BH merger events. These events may carry important clues about the astrophysical host environments of the GW sources. In this paper, we present the distributions of the effective spin parameter (χeff), the precession spin parameter (χp), and the chirp mass (mchirp) expected in hierarchical mergers. Under a wide range of assumptions, hierarchical mergers produce (i) a monotonic increase of the average of the typical total spin for merging binaries, which we characterize with $$\scriptstyle{{\bar{\chi }}_\mathrm{typ}\equiv \overline{(\chi _\mathrm{eff}^2+\chi _\mathrm{p}^2)^{1/2}}}$$, up to roughly the maximum mchirp among first-generation (1g) BHs, and (ii) a plateau at $${\bar{\chi }}_\mathrm{typ}\sim 0.6$$ at higher mchirp. We suggest that the maximum mass and typical spin magnitudes for 1g BHs can be estimated from $${\bar{\chi }}_\mathrm{typ}$$ as a function of mchirp. The GW data observed in LIGO/Virgo O1–O3a prefers an increase in $${\bar{\chi }}_\mathrm{typ}$$ at low mchirp, which is consistent with the growth of the BH spin magnitude by hierarchical mergers at ∼2σ confidence. A Bayesian analysis using the χeff, χp, and mchirp distributions suggests that 1g BHs have the maximum mass of ∼15–$$30\, {\rm M}_\odot$$ if the majority of mergers are of high-generation BHs (not among 1g–1g BHs), which is consistent with mergers in active galactic nucleus discs and/or nuclear star clusters, while if mergers mainly originate from globular clusters, 1g BHs are favoured to have non-zero spin magnitudes of ∼0.3. We also forecast that signatures for hierarchical mergers in the $${\bar{\chi }}_\mathrm{typ}$$ distribution can be confidently recovered once the number of GW events increases to ≳ O(100).