2009/03/31 by Alberto Sesana, Jonathan Gair, Ilya Mandel +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Binary black hole #Black hole (networking) #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution #Einstein Telescope #Galaxy #Gamma-ray burst progenitors #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gravitational wave #Intermediate-mass black hole #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Redshift #Solar mass #Stellar black hole #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/698/2/l129
published as Astrophys.J.698:L129-L132,2009 · 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted to ApJ letters; v2 contains more technical details in response to referee's comments, 1 new figure, table removed
arxiv created 2009/05/13 · openalex publication_date 2009/06/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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 M ☉ 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.