Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics

By J. Samsing, D. D’Orazio. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that nearly half of all binary black hole (BBH) mergers dynamically assembled in globular clusters have measurable eccentricities (e > 0.01) in the LISA band (10^−2 Hz), when General Relativistic corrections are properly included in the N-body evolution. If only Newtonian gravity is included, the derived fraction of eccentric LISA sources is significantly lower, which explains why recent studies all have greatly underestimated this fraction. Our findings have major implications for how to observationally distinguish between BBH formation channels using eccentricity with LISA, which is one of the key science goals of the mission. We illustrate that the relatively large population of eccentric LISA sources reported here originates from BBHs that merge between hardening binary–single interactions inside their globular cluster. These results indicate a bright future for using LISA to probe the origin of BBH mergers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ccb7b6a84b17f8d11f2b5c23a547810705003a7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Samsing
2. C. Rodriguez
3. F. Rasio
4. Michael Zevin
5. C. Haster
6. E. Ramirez-Ruiz
7. Mario Spera
8. S. Chatterjee

Citations in the corpus

• Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in Dense Star Clusters: The Role of Binary–Binary Encounters (2018, background): “Similar to the binary-single interactions studied in Samsing & D’Orazio (2018) and D’Orazio & Samsing (2018), we find these populations of BBHs formed through binary-binary encounters to have eccentricities measurable by LISA.”
• GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, background): “Multiple authors (e.g., Samsing & Ramirez-Ruiz 2017; Rodriguez et al. 2018a, 2018b; Samsing 2018; Samsing & D’Orazio 2018) show that we can expect 5”
• Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, background): “…(GW) sources (e.g., Moody & Sigurdsson 2009; Banerjee et al. 2010; Bae et al. 2014; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Askar et al. 2017; Banerjee 2017; Fragione & Kocsis 2018; Hong et al. 2018; Rodriguez et al. 2018a; Samsing & D’Orazio 2018; Kremer et al. 2019c; Zevin et al. 2019).”