Observing gravitational waves from the first generation of black holes

Details Observing gravitational waves from the first generation of black holes Observing gravitational waves from the first generation of black holes

2009-03-24

arxiv.org/abs/0903.4177v2

Astrophys.J.698:L129-L132,2009

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted to ApJ letters; v2 contains more technical details in response to referee's comments, 1

Scientific paper

10.1088/0004-637X/698/2/L129

The properties of the first generation of black-hole seeds trace and distinguish different models of formation of cosmic structure in the high-redshift universe. The observational challenge lies in identifying black holes in the mass range ~100-1000 solar masses at redshift z~10. The typical frequencies of gravitational waves produced by the coalescence of the first generation of light seed black-hole binaries fall in the gap between the spectral ranges of low-frequency space-borne detectors (e.g., LISA) and high-frequency ground-based detectors (e.g., LIGO, Virgo and GEO 600). As such, these sources are targets for proposed third-generation ground-based instruments, such as the Einstein Telescope which is currently in design study. Using galaxy merger trees and four different models of black hole accretion - which are meant to illustrate the potential of this new type of source rather than to yield precise event-rate predictions - we find that such detectors could observe a few to a few tens of seed black-hole merger events in three years and provide, possibly unique, information on the evolution of structure in the corresponding era. We show further that a network of detectors may be able to measure the luminosity distance to sources to a precision of ~40%, allowing us to be confident of the high-redshift nature of the sources.

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