Gravitational waves from coalescing binaries and Doppler experiments

Abstract

Doppler tracking of interplanetary spacecraft provides the only method presently available for broad-band searches of low frequency gravitational waves. The instruments have a peak sensitivity around the reciprocal of the round-trip light-time T of the radio link connecting the Earth to the space-probe and therefore are particularly suitable to search for coalescing binaries containing massive black holes in galactic nuclei. A number of Doppler experiments -- the most recent involving the probes ULYSSES, GALILEO and MARS OBSERVER -- have been carried out so far; moreover, in 2002-2004 the CASSINI spacecraft will perform three 40 days data acquisition runs with expected sensitivity about twenty times better than that achieved so far. Central aims of this paper are: (i) to explore, as a function of the relevant instrumental and astrophysical parameters, the Doppler output produced by in-spiral signals -- sinusoids of increasing frequency and amplitude (the so-called chirp); (ii) to identify the most important parameter regions where to concentrate intense and dedicated data analysis; (iii) to analyze the all-sky and all-frequency sensitivity of the CASSINI's experiments, with particular emphasis on possible astrophysical targets, such as our Galactic Centre and the Virgo Cluster.

52 pages, LaTeX, 19 Postscript Figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (4)

• Improved filters for gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries
• Dynamical Constraints On Alternatives To Massive Black Holes In Galactic Nuclei
• On the multipole expansion of the gravitational field
• Galactic Binary Gravitational Wave Noise within LISA Frequency Band

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• Searching for continuous gravitational wave sources in binary systems
• Searching for gravitational waves via Doppler tracking by future missions to Uranus and Neptune
• Bounds on gravitational wave backgrounds from large distance clock comparisons
• Detecting milli-Hz gravitational waves with optical resonators