The Orbital Statistics of Stellar Inspiral and Relaxation near a Massive Black Hole: Characterizing Gravitational Wave Sources

By Clovis Hopman, T. Alexander. 2005

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We study the orbital parameter distribution of stars that are scattered into nearly radial orbits and then spiral into a massive black hole (MBH) due to dissipation, in particular by emission of gravitational waves (GWs). This is important for GW detection, e.g., by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Signal identification requires knowledge of the waveforms, which depend on the orbital parameters. We use analytical and Monte Carlo methods to analyze the interplay between GW dissipation and scattering in the presence of a mass sink during the transition from the initial scattering-dominated phase to the final dissipation-dominated phase of the inspiral. Our main results are as follows. (1) Stars typically enter the GW-emitting phase with high eccentricities. (2) The GW event rate per galaxy is a few × 10-9 yr-1 for typical central stellar cusps, almost independently of the relaxation time or the MBH mass. (3) For intermediate-mass black holes of ~103 M☉ such as may exist in dense stellar clusters, the orbits are very eccentric and the inspiral is rapid, so the sources are very short-lived.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00fcbc7295c3a2552dd20e855b655e51b16d175d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Stellar Remnants in Galactic Nuclei: Mass Segregation (2006, background): “The detailed analysis of such situations has only recently been pioneered (Alexander & Hopman 2003; Hopman & Alexander 2005).”
The Effect of Mass Segregation on Gravitational Wave Sources near Massive Black Holes (2006, background): “…authors (Hils & Bender 1995; Sigurdsson & Rees 1997; Miralda-Escudé & Gould 2000; Freitag 2001; Ivanov 2002; Freitag 2003; Alexander & Hopman 2003; Hopman & Alexander 2005, 2006) but remains rather uncertain, in part because of the slow nature of the inspiral process, which occurs on many…”
Quantifying the coexistence of massive black holes and dense nuclear star clusters (2009, result): “Due to the substantially higher density of stars in NCs, compared to the underlying host galaxy (see Figure 7.5), past estimates of LISA-detectable gravitational radiation events (e.g. Sigurdsson 1997; Freitag 2001; Gair et al. 2004; Hopman & Alexander 2005, 2006a,b) may need to be revised upwards.”
Massive Perturber-driven Interactions between Stars and a Massive Black Hole (2006, background): “For inspiral processes such as GW emission, rc is ∼ 100 times smaller still (Hopman & Alexander 2005, 2006b).”
STRONG MASS SEGREGATION AROUND A MASSIVE BLACK HOLE (2008, methodology): “…stellar dynamical processes within ∗Incumbent of the William Z. & Eda Bess Novick career development chair Electronic address: tal.alexander@weizmann.ac.il Electronic address: clovis@strw.leidenuniv.nl O(0.01pc) of the MBH, where inspiraling sources originate (e.g. Hopman & Alexander 2005, 2006a).”
Resonant Relaxation near a Massive Black Hole: The Stellar Distribution and Gravitational Wave Sources (2006, methodology): “To verify that RR does not significantly affect the transition phase of inspiral and the value of the critical energy, we followed the approach used by Hils & Bender (1995) and Hopman & Alexander (2005), who performed Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of the scattering of stars inJ-space.”
Stellar Dynamics and Stellar Phenomena Near a Massive Black Hole (2017, background): “The transition between the two regimes is quite sharp (Hopman & Alexander 2005).”