2009/12/31 by Nicolás Yunes, Nicolas Yunes, Frans Pretorius +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Binary black hole #Black hole (networking) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxy #Gravitational wave #Gravitational-wave observatory #LIGO #Luminosity distance #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Redshift #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.81.064018
published as Phys.Rev.D81:064018,2010 · 11 pages, 2 figures, replaced with version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D.
openalex publication_date 2010/03/15 · arxiv created 2010/04/13 · arxiv updated 2010/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Space-borne gravitational wave detectors, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, are expected to observe black hole coalescences to high redshift and with large signal-to-noise ratios, rendering their gravitational waves ideal probes of fundamental physics. The promotion of Newton's constant to a time function introduces modifications to the binary's binding energy and the gravitational wave luminosity, leading to corrections in the chirping frequency. Such corrections propagate into the response function and, given a gravitational wave observation, they allow for constraints on the first time derivative of Newton's constant at the time of merger. We find that space-borne detectors could indeed place interesting constraints on this quantity as a function of sky position and redshift, providing a constraint map over the entire range of redshifts where binary black hole mergers are expected to occur. A gravitational wave observation of an inspiral event with redshifted masses of 104--105 solar masses for three years should be able to measure \stackrel\ifmmode \else \textperiodcentered \fiG/G at the time of merger to better than 10^\ensuremath-11 yr^\ensuremath-1.