Papers › MAGICS I. The First Few Orbits Encode the Fate of Seed Massive Black Hole Pairs
MAGICS I. The First Few Orbits Encode the Fate of Seed Massive Black Hole Pairs
Nianyi Chen, Diptajyoti Mukherjee, Tiziana Di Matteo, Yueying Ni, Simeon Bird, Rupert Croft
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The elusive massive black hole (MBH) seeds stand to be revealed by the Laser Space Antenna Interferometer through mergers. As an aftermath of galaxy mergers, MBH coalescence is a vastly multi-scale process connected to galaxy formation. We introduce the "Massive black hole Assembly in Galaxies Informed by Cosmological Simulations" (MAGICS) suite, with galaxy/MBH properties and orbits recovered from large-volume cosmological simulation ASTRID. The simulations include subgrid star formation, supernovae feedback, and MBH accretion/feedback. In this first suite, we extract fifteen representative galaxy mergers with seed MBHs to examine their dynamics at an improved mass and spatial resolution (by ∼2000 and ∼20) and follow MBH orbits down to ∼10 pc. We find that the seed MBH energy loss and orbital decay are largely governed by global torques induced by the galaxy merger process on scales resolvable by cosmological simulations. Specifically, pairs sink quickly if their orbits shrink rapidly below 1 kpc during the first ∼200 Myr of pairing due to effective energy loss in major galaxy mergers, whereas MBHs gaining energy in minor galaxy mergers with head-on collisions are likely to stall. High initial eccentricities (eᵢₙᵢₜ>0.5) and high stellar densities at kpc scales (ρₛₜₐᵣ>0.05 M_⊙/pc³) also lead to most efficient decays. ∼50% high-redshift seed MBH pairs experience consecutive galaxy mergers and are more likely to stall at ∼1 kpc. For a subset of systems, we carry out N-Body re-simulations until binary formation and find that some stalled systems merge at high-z when embedded in sufficient nuclear star clusters.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections