Gravitational waves from a compact star in a circular, inspiral orbit, in the equatorial plane of a massive, spinning black hole, as observed by LISA

By L. Finn, K. R. D. O. Physics, AstronomyAstrophysics, T. O. S. University, University Park, Pa, T. Astrophysics, C. I. O. Technology., Pasadena, Ca. 2000

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Results are presented from high-precision computations of the orbital evolution and emitted gravitational waves for a stellar-mass object spiraling into a massive black hole in a slowly shrinking, circular, equatorial orbit. The focus of these computations is inspiral near the innermost stable circular orbit (isco)—more particularly, on orbits for which the angular velocity Ω is 0.03≲Ω/Ωisco 10 at r0=1 Gpc during the last year of inspiral. The hole’s spin a has a factor of ∼10 influence on the range of M (at fixed μ) for which S/N>10, and the presence or absence of a white-dwarf–binary background has a factor of ∼3 influence. A comparison with predicted event rates shows strong promise for detecting these waves, but not beyond about 1 Gpc if the inspiraling object is a white dwarf or neutron star. This argues for a modest lowering of LISA’s noise floor. A brief discussion is given of the prospects for extracting information from the observed waves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0619c5100d2b44e998736f646ad67056773fd48

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

Citations in the corpus

Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, methodology): “s (Drasco and Hughes, 2006). Nonetheless, results have been fully tabulated for certain restricted types of orbit. For the calculations described here we will use data for circular-equatorial orbits (Finn and Thorne, 2000, Gair, 2009a). We can use both models to compute the maximum detectable redshi”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “For LISA, Table 1 gives the internal instrumental noise only, taken from [162].”
Starbursts near supermassive black holes: young stars in the Galactic Centre, and gravitational waves in LISA band (2006, background): “Finn and Thorne (2000) have performed a detailed census of parameter space for circular-orbit equatorial inspirals as seen by LISA.”
Shapes and Positions of Black Hole Shadows in Accretion Disks and Spin Parameters of Black Holes (2004, background): “…hole (e.g., Conners et al. 1980), microlensing light curves due to a black hole acting as a lensing object (e.g., Asada et al. 2003), and gravitational wave emission from a star orbiting around a black hole (e.g., Tanaka et al. 1996; Finn & Thorne 2000) are also influenced by a black hole rotation.”
Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays (2015, methodology): “On the other hand, when simulating the GWB signal, we will simply use the sky and polarisation average strain (Finn & Thorne 2000), h = A √ 1 2 [a2 + b2], (4) where A = 2 G5/3M5/3[πf [1 + z]]2/3 c4r (5) is the dimensionless amplitude of the signal, and the contributions from the two wave…”
The gravitational wave background from cosmological compact binaries (2003, background): “…at http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/listwg1/) is the detection of gravitational waves from compact objects spiralling into supermassive black holes (Finn & Thorne 2000; Hils & Bender 1995), since these can provide precision tests of strong field relativity and the no-hair theorem (Hughes 2001).”
Supermassive Stars in Quasar Disks (2003, background): “We estimate the “modified characteristic amplitude” for quadrupole gravitational waves as defined by Finn & Thorne (2000) from the inspiral of a compact source with a mass equal to the isolation mass formed at 103Rs from the central black hole (Figure 4).”