Talk detail

Participant	Noble, Scott
Institution	NASA-GSFC and the University of Tulsa - 8800 Greenbelt Rd. - Greenbelt - MD - USA

Session	AC3	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Lighting Up Magnetized Mini-Disk Simulations about Binary Black Holes
Coauthors
Abstract	Accretion disks around supermassive binary black holes offer a rare opportunity to probe the strong-field limit of dynamical gravity by using the ambient matter as a lighthouse. Accurate simulations of these systems using a variety of configurations will be critical to interpreting future observations of them. We have performed the first 3-d general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations of mini-disks about a pair of equal mass black holes in the inspiral regime of their orbit. In this talk, we will present these results and explore whether these systems provide a unique means to identify and characterize them with electromagnetic observations. We will provide a brief summary of the known electromagnetic signatures, and describe our latest predictions for an accreting binary's energy spectrum, variability, and angular dependence from post-process ray-tracing calculations using our simulation data. We will also provide a context for our results and describe our future avenues of exploration.
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