Gravitational radiation timescales for extreme mass ratio inspirals

Abstract

The capture and inspiral of compact stellar masses into massive black holes is an important source of low-frequency gravitational waves (with frequencies of ~1-100mHz), such as those that might be detected by the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Simulations of stellar clusters designed to study this problem typically rely on simple treatments of the black hole encounter which neglect some important features of orbits around black holes, such as the minimum radii of stable, non-plunging orbits. Incorporating an accurate representation of the orbital dynamics near a black hole has been avoided due to the large computational overhead. This paper provides new, more accurate, expressions for the energy and angular momentum lost by a compact object during a parabolic encounter with a non-spinning black hole, and the subsequent inspiral lifetime. These results improve on the Keplerian expressions which are now commonly used and will allow efficient computational simulations to be performed that account for the relativistic nature of the spacetime around the central black hole in the system.

19 pages, 4 figures. Changed in response to referee's report. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• "Kludge" gravitational waveforms for a test-body orbiting a Kerr black hole
• Extreme- and Intermediate-Mass Ratio Inspirals in Dynamical Chern-Simons Modified Gravity
• Detection Rate Estimates of Gravity-waves Emitted During Parabolic Encounters of Stellar Black Holes in Globular Clusters
• Steady state relativistic stellar dynamics around a massive black hole
• Relativistic Effects in Extreme Mass Ratio Gravitational Wave Bursts
• Pseudo-Newtonian Potentials for Nearly Parabolic Orbits
• A bright electromagnetic counterpart to extreme mass ratio inspirals
• Mass Segregation in Eccentric Nuclear Disks: Enhanced Tidal Disruption Event Rates for High Mass Stars
• Revised event rates for extreme and extremely large mass-ratio inspirals