The promise of multi-band gravitational wave astronomy

By A. Sesana. 2016

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the black hole binary (BHB) coalescence rates inferred from the advanced LIGO (aLIGO) detection of GW150914 imply an unexpectedly loud GW sky at milli-Hz frequencies accessible to the evolving Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA), with several outstanding consequences. First, up to thousands of BHB will be individually resolvable by eLISA; second, millions of non resolvable BHBs will build a confusion noise detectable with signal-to-noise ratio of few to hundreds; third -- and perhaps most importantly -- up to hundreds of BHBs individually resolvable by eLISA will coalesce in the aLIGO band within ten years. eLISA observations will tell aLIGO and all electromagnetic probes weeks in advance when and where these BHB coalescences are going to occur, with uncertainties of<10s and<1deg^2. This will allow the pre-pointing of telescopes to realize coincident GW and multi-wavelength electromagnetic observations of BHB mergers. Time coincidence is critical because prompt emission associated to a BHB merger will likely have a duration comparable to the dynamical time-scale of the systems, and is only possible with low frequency GW alerts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e3d59430be523cd96a16e2f20931938ba50f260

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “The fact that BBH mergers can be jointly observed by LISA and LIGO was recently pointed out by Sesana (2016) and Seto (2016).”
Improved reconstruction of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2020, methodology): “Extrapolating this information from the LIGO to the LISA frequency band leads to the foreground model [21, 45]8”
Science with the space-based interferometer LISA. IV: probing inflation with gravitational waves (2016, background): “A paper on the GW signal from EMRIs is in preparation, and other studies dealing with the scientific performances of (e)LISA have also been completed outside the series, see for example [66, 67, 71].”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, background): “For instance, the first observed GW event, GW150914, would have been in the LISA bandwidth from about 10 yr to less than 1 yr before coalescence, and could have accumulated in the LISA bandwidth a signal-to-noise ratio between three and fifteen (depending on the detector configuration), and therefor”