The Coalescence Rate of Double Neutron Star Systems

By Vicky Kalogera, Ramesh Narayan, David N. Spergel, J. Taylor. 2000

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We estimate the coalescence rate of close binaries with two neutron stars (NS) and discuss the prospects for the detection of NS-NS inspiral events by ground-based gravitational-wave observatories, such as LIGO. We derive the Galactic coalescence rate using the observed sample of close NS-NS binaries (PSR B1913+16 and PSR B1534+12) and examine in detail each of the sources of uncertainty associated with the estimate. Specifically, we investigate (1) the dynamical evolution of NS-NS binaries in the Galactic potential and the vertical scale height of the population, (2) the pulsar lifetimes, (3) the effects of the faint end of the radio pulsar luminosity function and their dependence on the small number of observed objects, (4) the beaming fraction, and (5) the extrapolation of the Galactic rate to extragalactic distances expected to be reachable by LIGO. We find that the dominant source of uncertainty is the correction factor (up to ≃200) for faint (undetectable) pulsars. All other sources are much less important, each with uncertainty factors smaller than 2. Despite the relatively large uncertainty, the derived coalescence rate is consistent with previously derived upper limits, and is more accurate than rates obtained from population studies. We obtain a most conservative lower limit that the detection rate by LIGO II of about 2 events per year. Our upper limit on the rate is between 300 and 1000 events per year.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7988035cdff0b98ef8463e918d1efb325a9d211f

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Citations in the corpus

Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research (2004, background): “Depending on the uncertain rate of NS/NS and BH/BH mergers in galaxies (Lipunov, Postnov, & Prokhorov 1997; Kalogera et al. 2001), LIGO will be able to detect NS/NS mergers out to 20 Mpc (Abbott et al. 2004) when it achieves its design sensitivity.”
Wave Effects in the Gravitational Lensing of Gravitational Waves from Chirping Binaries (2003, background): “Since mergers of neutron star binaries will be detected at at least several per year by LIGO II (Phinney 1991; Kalogera et al. 2001) and 105 yr 1 by DECIGO, the lensing events will also be expected for other detectors.”
THE HISTORY OF R-PROCESS ENRICHMENT IN THE MILKY WAY (2014, background): “Delay-time distribution, merger rates and r-process yields The merger DTD,P(t), is well-modeled by a powerlaw (Piran 1992; Kalogera et al. 2001), although there is significant uncertainty on the value of the exponent (e.g. Behroozi et al. 2014, and references therein).”
Short-hard gamma-ray bursts (2007, background): “Kalogera et al. (2001) carried out detailed investigation of the uncertainties in these rate estimates and found that the uncertainty in the correction for undetected faint systems can span over two orders of magnitude.”
Cosmological Fast Radio Bursts from Binary Neutron Star Mergers (2013, background): “A beaming fractionΩ/(4π) of order unity is not unreasonable given the theoretical uncertainty about beaming of pulsar radio emission (e.g., Kalogera et al. 2001), where Ω is the total opening solid angle of radio emission.”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: a tale of two elements - chemical evolution of magnesium and europium (2017, methodology): “Similarly to the SNIa implementation, the time dependence of injection is modeled by a DTD, which is approximated as a power law (Piran 1992; Kalogera et al. 2001) with index 1.12 for t > tcut and zero otherwise.”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, methodology): “Following the method of Shen et al. (2015), we use a power-law delay time distribution (Piran 1992; Kalogera et al. 2001) with the same DTD index (1.12) but with a different cut off time scale and normalization as compared to the SNIa DTD (see Naiman et al. 2017, for more details).”
Studies of the Relativistic Binary Pulsar PSR B1534+12. I. Timing Analysis (2002, background): “%) increase in the number density of similar systems in the local universe, with the uncertainty now dominated by the uncertain scale height of such binaries (e.g., Kalogera et al. 2001).”
The astrophysical gravitational wave stochastic background (2011, background): “…Myr−1 Mpc−3, is usually extrapolated by taking the product of the rate in the Milky Way (rmw in yr−1) and the density of Milky-Way equivalent galaxies, given from measurements of the blue stellar luminosity around nmw ∼ (1−2)×10−2 Mpc−3 (Phinney 1991; Kalogera et al. 2001; Kopparapu et al. 2008).”
ACCELERATING COMPACT OBJECT MERGERS IN TRIPLE SYSTEMS WITH THE KOZAI RESONANCE: A MECHANISM FOR “PROMPT” TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE, GAMMA-RAY BURSTS, AND OTHER EXOTICA (2010, background): “Similarly, the massive star birthrate, which is ap- 1 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow proximately equal to the Type-II supernova rate,∼ 105 Gpc−3 yr−1 (e.g., Horiuchi et al. 2009), is∼ 20− 600 times larger than the NS-NS merger rate (Kalogera et al. 2001, 2004ab; O’Shaughnessy et al. 2008).”
Predictions for the rates of compact binary coalescences observable by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors (2010, background): “(This conversion factor follows from the discussion in [22]).”
A Comprehensive Study of Binary Compact Objects as Gravitational Wave Sources: Evolutionary Channels, Rates, and Physical Properties (2001, methodology): “…both methods appear burdened with significant uncertainties, the theoretical approach because of the many poorly constrained evolutionary model parameters and the empirical estimates because of small-number sample of observed NS-NS systems (for a more detailed discussion see Kalogera et al. 2001).”
Galactic distribution of merging neutron stars and black holes – prospects for short gamma-ray burst progenitors and LIGO/VIRGO (2003, methodology): “Using the latter method Kalogera et al. (2001) found a scaling factor of (1.0–1.5) × 10−2 Mpc−3, or equivalently, ∼400 for LIGO I (out to 20 Mpc for NSNS mergers).”
Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, background): “…Evolution driven by mass transfer (e.g., Dosopoulou & Kalogera 2016a,b), followed by a common envelope phase (e.g., Kalogera & Webbink 1998) can lead to the formation of short period NS-NS binaries which can merge in less than one Hubble time (e.g., Kalogera et al. 2001; de Mink & Belczynski 2015).”
The Velocity Distribution of Isolated Radio Pulsars (2001, result): “The inclusion of a significant fraction of large kicks into binary evolution simulations will likely bring their birth and merger rate predictions in line with empirical estimates based on the small sample of known DNS systems (e.g., Arzoumanian, Cordes & Wasserman 1999; Kalogera et al. 2001).”