Searching for gravitational waves via Doppler tracking by future missions to Uranus and Neptune

Abstract

The past year has seen numerous publications underlining the importance of a space mission to the ice giants in the upcoming decade. Proposed mission plans involve a $\sim$10 year cruise time to the ice giants. This cruise time can be utilized to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) by observing the Doppler shift caused by them in the Earth-spacecraft radio link. We calculate the sensitivity of prospective ice giant missions to GWs. Then, adopting a steady-state black hole binary population, we derive a conservative estimate for the detection rate of extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), supermassive- (SMBH) and stellar mass binary black hole (sBBH) mergers. We link the SMBH population to the fraction of quasars $f_\rm{bin}$ resulting from galaxy mergers that pair SMBHs to a binary. For a total of ten 40-day observations during the cruise of a single spacecraft, $\mathcal{O}(f_\rm{bin})\sim0.5$ detections of SMBH mergers are likely, if Allan deviation of Cassini-era noise is improved by $\sim 10^2$ in the $10^{-5}-10^{-3}$ Hz range. For EMRIs the number of detections lies between $\mathcal{O}(0.1)-\mathcal{O}(100)$. Furthermore, ice giant missions combined with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) would improve the localisation by an order of magnitude compared to LISA by itself.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in MNRAS: Letters

References in corpus (32)

• GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs
• Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• An Observational Determination of the Bolometric Quasar Luminosity Function
• An Optical Lattice Clock with Accuracy and Stability at the $10^{-18}$ Level
• The Assembly and Merging History of Supermassive Black Holes in Hierarchical Models of Galaxy Formation
• astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python
• GW150914: The Advanced LIGO Detectors in the Era of First Discoveries
• Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves
• The construction and use of LISA sensitivity curves
• Intermediate and Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals -- Astrophysics, Science Applications and Detection using LISA
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. I: Supermassive black hole binaries
• The promise of multi-band gravitational wave astronomy
• Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Binaries: Predictions for LISA and Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Phenomenological template family for black-hole coalescence waveforms
• The Population of Viscosity- and Gravitational Wave-Driven Supermassive Black Hole Binaries Among Luminous AGN
• The Astrophysics of Nanohertz Gravitational Waves
• A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates
• Accretion-Driven Evolution of Black Holes: Eddington Ratios, Duty Cycles, and Active Galaxy Fractions
• Triangulation of gravitational wave sources with a network of detectors
• The gravitational wave signal from massive black hole binaries and its contribution to the LISA data stream
• Multiband gravitational-wave event rates and stellar physics
• Pre-Merger Localization of Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens With LISA: Triggered Search for an Electromagnetic Counterpart
• A New Type of Extreme-mass-ratio Inspirals Produced by Tidal Capture of Binary Black Holes
• The Interiors of Uranus and Neptune: Current Understanding and Open Questions
• Pre-Merger Localization of Gravitational-Wave Standard Sirens With LISA I: Harmonic Mode Decomposition
• Observations and analysis of phase scintillation of spacecraft signal on the interplanetary plasma
• Detecting Gravitational Self Lensing from Stellar-Mass Binaries Composed of Black Holes or Neutron Stars
• LISA Detection of Binary Black Holes in the Milky Way Galaxy
• Methods for coherent optical Doppler orbitography
• Gravitational waves from coalescing binaries and Doppler experiments
• Detecting the Orbital Motion of Nearby Supermassive Black Hole Binaries with Gaia
• Exploration of the Ice Giant Systems: A White Paper for NASA's Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Asteroids for $\mu$Hz gravitational-wave detection
• Principles of Gravitational-Wave Detection with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Zonal winds of Uranus and Neptune: Gravitational harmonics, dynamic self-gravity, shape, and rotation
• Linking Uranus' temperature profile to wind-induced magnetic fields
• Prospects for a local detection of dark matter with future missions to Uranus and Neptune
• Detecting gravitational waves with light
• Prospects for localising Planet 9 with a future Uranus mission
• Dirty waveforms: multiband harmonic content of gas-embedded gravitational wave sources