Simulating Effects of Dynamical Friction in a Supermassive Black Hole Binary Merger

Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are expected to be found at the center of galaxies that have recently merged. After galaxies merge, the main mechanism that brings supermassive black holes to their centers is dynamical friction, a drag force that comes from the gravitational interactions of these supermassive black holes with field stars. The interactions from the distribution of stars incrementally slow down the SMBHs, causing the binaries to come closer together over a timescale. We present a simulation model of dynamical friction that seeks to explore how various orbital and galaxy properties affect the separation distribution of SMBHBs’s progenitors. We then investigate how these results compare to known dual active galactic nuclei (AGN) samples and investigate how they can inform gravitational wave background inference models.