{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-effect-of-interstellar-medium-on-lvk-s","title":"The effect of interstellar medium on LVK's black holes","arxiv_id":"2405.17863","date":"2024-05-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sohan Ghodla"],"abstract":"Gravitational radiation alone is not efficient in hardening the orbit of a wide binary black hole (BBH). By employing a toy model for the interstellar medium (ISM) surrounding BBHs, here we discuss the effect of this baryonic medium on BBH dynamics. Depending on the BBH's mass, we show that a binary surrounded by an isotropic cold neutral medium (i.e., an asymptotic temperature $T_{\\infty} \\approx 100$ K) with a time-averaged particle density of $\\langle n_H \\rangle = \\mathcal{O}(1)$ cm$^{-3}$ can play a significant role in hardening the binary orbit over a $\\mathcal{O}(10^9)$ yr time scale. Additionally, this causes the black hole's mass to grow at a rate $\\propto m^2$. We thus discuss the impact of the ISM on the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) observables and quantify the properties of the ISM under which the latter could act as an additional important pathway for driving a subset of LVK's BBH mergers.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17863v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17863v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-effect-of-interstellar-medium-on-lvk-s","repo_url":"https://github.com/SohanGhodla/Black-holes-embedded-in-an-ISM","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}