Gravitational waves from intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals for ground-based detectors

Abstract

We explore the prospects for Advanced LIGO to detect gravitational waves from neutron stars and stellar mass black holes spiraling into intermediate-mass ($M\sim 50M_{\odot }$ to $350M_{\odot }$) black holes. We estimate an event rate for such \emph{intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals} (IMRIs) of up to $\sim 10$--$30{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. Our numerical simulations show that if the central body is not a black hole but its metric is stationary, axisymmetric, reflection symmetric and asymptotically flat then the waves will likely be tri-periodic, as for a black hole. We report generalizations of a theorem due to Ryan (1995) which suggest that the evolutions of the waves' three fundamental frequencies and of the complex amplitudes of their spectral components encode (in principle) a full map of the central body's metric, full details of the energy and angular momentum exchange between the central body and the orbit, and the time-evolving orbital elements. We estimate that Advanced LIGO can measure or constrain deviations of the central body from a Kerr black hole with modest but interesting accuracy.

Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (1)

• Total recoil: the maximum kick from nonspinning black-hole binary inspiral

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