Untangling the merger history of massive black holes with LISA

By S. Hughes. 2001

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Binary black hole coalescences emit gravitational waves that will be measurable by the space-based detector LISA to large redshifts. This suggests that LISA may be able to observe black holes grow and evolve as the Universe evolves, mapping the distribution of black hole masses as a function of redshift. An immediate difficulty with this idea is that LISA measures certain redshifted combinations of masses with good accuracy: if a system has some mass parameter m, then LISA measures (1 + z)m. This mass-redshift degeneracy makes it difficult to follow the mass evolution. In many cases, LISA will also measure the luminosity distance D of a coalescence accurately. Since cosmological parameters (particularly the mean density, the cosmological constant and the Hubble constant) are now known with moderate precision, we can obtain z from D and break the degeneracy. This makes it possible to untangle the mass and redshift and to study the mass and merger history of black holes. Mapping the black hole mass distribution could open a window on to an early epoch of structure formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f90520cb16cd2821629f33b9e12bf937a2d3fcc

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Citations in the corpus

The Universe Was Reionized Twice (2002, background): “The merger of Population III black holes with supramassive black holes at the centers of galaxies may be detectable by the gravitational wave experiment, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) (see, e.g., Menou, Haiman, &Narayanan 2001; Hughes 2002).”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, methodology): “Since the merger activity peaks near z 10, LISA should be able to measure the masses of most of these SMBH binaries to high prevision (Hughes 2002; Arun et al. 2008).”
DWARF GALAXIES WITH OPTICAL SIGNATURES OF ACTIVE MASSIVE BLACK HOLES (2013, background): “Finally, signatures of tidal disruptions of stars are strongest for low-mass BHs (e.g., Strubbe & Quataert 2009; Rosswog et al. 2009; Miller & Gültekin 2011) and ∼ 105 M BH mergers have the right frequency to provide a signal for future gravitational wave experiments (e.g., Hughes 2002).”
Taiji program: Gravitational-wave sources (2018, background): “[8] S.”
The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream (2007, background): “A low–frequency detector like LISA will be sensitive to GWs from coalescing binaries with total masses in the range 103 − 106 M⊙ out to z ∼ 5 − 10 (Hughes 2002).”
Formation of z~6 Quasars from Hierarchical Galaxy Mergers (2006, background): “…strong sources of gravitational radiation detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA; Folkner 1998), as suggested by many authors (e.g., Thorne & Braginskii 1976; Haehnelt 1998; Flanagan & Hughes 1998; Menou et al. 2001; Hughes 2002; Sesana et al. 2005; Koushiappas & Zentner 2006).”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “2.5) and the coalescence of IMBHs pairs provide the right signal for detection in gravitational wave experiments (e.g., Hughes 2002; Amaro-Seoane & Santamaŕıa 2010; see Sect.”
The Afterglow of Massive Black Hole Coalescence (2004, background): “The angular resolution of LISA ranges from several arcminutes to several degrees depending on the black hole mass, mass ratio, and redshift (Cutler 1998; Hughes 2002).”
Wave Effects in the Gravitational Lensing of Gravitational Waves from Chirping Binaries (2003, methodology): “(The effect of lensing on measuring the distance has been recently discussed in Holz & Hughes 2002.)”
A New Sample of Low-Mass Black Holes in Active Galaxies (2007, background): “The merging of BHs in this mass range is expected to provide a strong signal for the gravitational wave experim nt LISA (e.g., Hughes 2002).”
Supermassive black hole binaries in gaseous and stellar circumnuclear discs: orbital dynamics and gas accretion (2006, background): “Ultimately, binary MBHs may eventually coalesce emitting low–frequency gravitational waves detectable c© 0000 RAS by LISA (Bender et al. 1994; Hughes 2002; Sesana et al. 2005).”
Using Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens (2005, methodology): “…simple and well modeled (at least in the early ‘‘in-spiral’’ phase of their coalescence), the GWs they generate determine the source’s luminosity distance with high accuracy: typically DL /DL 1% 10%, with most of the uncertainty arising from correlations with pointing errors (Hughes 2002).”
Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Binaries: Predictions for LISA and Pulsar Timing Arrays (2002, methodology): “Individual events will yield useful information (Hughes 2002), but we might also expect the number counts of sources in frequency and strain (i.e., the time-averaged number of sources per unit frequency per unit strain at a single epoch) to provide constraints on the relation between BH and halo…”
Gravitational Waves Probe the Coalescence Rate of Massive Black Hole Binaries (2002, background): “However, only a subset of these events near 105 M will be detected with sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio for a sufficient length of time over the different phases of theMBH binary inspiral to enable a measurement of their individual masses and distances (see, e.g., Hughes 2002).”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “Seeds of mass ∼< 10 5 M can nevertheless be directly identified during their mergers, by detecting their emission of gravitational radiation (Hughes, 2002; Berti et al, 2006).”