LISA observations of rapidly spinning massive black hole binary systems

By Alberto Vecchio. 2003

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Binary systems of massive black holes will be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) throughout the entire Universe. Observations of gravitational waves from this class of sources will have important repercussions on our understanding of the behaviour of gravity in the highly non-linear relativistic regime, the distribution and interaction of massive black holes at high redshift and the formation and evolution of cosmic structures. It is therefore important to address how accurately LISA can measure the source parameters and explore the implications for astronomy and cosmology. Present observations and theoretical models suggest that massive black holes could be spinning, possibly rapidly in some cases. In binary systems, the relativistic spin-orbit interaction causes the orbital plane to precess in space producing a characteristic signature on the emitted gravitational waves. In this paper we investigate the effect of spins on the gravitational wave signal registered at the LISA output and the implications for parameter estimation. We consider the in-spiral phase of binary systems in circular orbit undergoing the so-called simple precession and we approximate the gravitational radiation at the restricted 1.5PN order. We show that the presence of spins changes dramatically the signature of the signal recorded by LISA. As a consequence, the mean square errors associated to the parameter measurements are significantly smaller than the ones obtained when the effect of spins is neglected. For a binary system of two $10^6 \Ms$ black holes, the angular resolution and the relative error on the luminosity distance improve by a factor $\approx$ 3-to-10: the fractional errors on the chirp mass and the reduced mass decrease by a factor $\sim 10$ and $\sim 10^3$, respectively.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51416adf5fa61556842c4648f869fdd222cdfb42

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Citations in the corpus

Binary Black Hole Mergers in the First Advanced LIGO Observing Run (2016, background): “This degeneracy could be broken if a signal contains a clear imprint of precession [97–100], but we have yet to observe this signature (see Sec.”
Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, background): “…could be broken by observing with more non co-aligned detectors (Veitch et al. 2012; Rodriguez et al. 2014), or if precession of the orbital plane is observed (Vecchio 2004; van der Sluys et al. 2008; Vitale et al. 2014), but this is not expected for slowly spinning BNS (Farr et al. 2016).”
GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “[152] Alberto Vecchio, “LISA observations of rapidly spinning massive black hole binary systems,” Phys.”
Using Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens (2005, background): “As discussed toward the end of x 2.3, these results may be conservative; accounting for spin-induced precessional effects may allow certain degeneracies to be broken and improve LISA’s pointing accuracy (Vecchio 2004).”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, background): “The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is expected to be able to detect mergers of SMBHs in the mass range ∼(104–107) M /(1+z) out to z ∼ 30, and to extract binary spins and BH masses with high precision up to z ∼ 10 (Vecchio 2004; Lang & Hughes 2006, 2007).”