Detecting Black Hole Binaries by Gaia

Masaki S. Yamaguchi, Norita Kawanaka, Tomasz Bulik, Tsvi Piran

Published 2017-10-26Version 1

We study the prospect of the Gaia satellite to identify black hole binary systems by detecting the orbital motion of the companion stars. Taking into account the initial mass function, mass transfer, common envelope phase, interstellar absorption and identifiability of black holes, we estimate the number of black hole binaries detected by Gaia and their distributions with respect to the black hole mass for several models with different parameters. We find that $\sim 300-6000$ black hole binaries will be detected by Gaia during its 5 years operation. The shape of distribution function of the black hole mass is affected most severely by the relation between the zero-age main sequence (ZAMS) stellar mass and the black hole mass in parameters adopted in this paper, which implies that black holes detected with Gaia enables us to constrain the mass relation.