2017/03/31 by Stanislav Babak, Jonathan Gair, Alberto Sesana +9 · 10 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Black hole (networking) #Cosmic variance #Eccentricity (behavior) #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gravitational wave #Interferometry #Luminosity #Luminosity distance #Mass ratio #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Redshift #Space (punctuation) #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.95.103012
published as Phys. Rev. D; 95(10):103012(21); 2017 · 13 figures, 22 pages; updated to match published version
openalex publication_date 2017/05/31 · arxiv created 2018/04/11 · arxiv updated 2018/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be able to observe the gravitational-wave signals from systems comprised of a massive black hole and a stellar-mass compact object. These systems are known as extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) and are expected to complete \ensuremath∼104--105 cycles in band, thus allowing exquisite measurements of their parameters. In this work, we attempt to quantify the astrophysical uncertainties affecting the predictions for the number of EMRIs detectable by LISA, and find that competing astrophysical assumptions produce a variance of about three orders of magnitude in the expected intrinsic EMRI rate. However, we find that irrespective of the astrophysical model, at least a few EMRIs per year should be detectable by the LISA mission, with up to a few thousands per year under the most optimistic astrophysical assumptions. We also investigate the precision with which LISA will be able to extract the parameters of these sources. We find that typical fractional statistical errors with which the intrinsic parameters (redshifted masses, massive black hole spin and orbital eccentricity) can be recovered are \ensuremath∼10^\ensuremath-6--10^\ensuremath-4. Luminosity distance (which is required to infer true masses) is inferred to about 10% precision and sky position is localized to a few square degrees, while tests of the multipolar structure of the Kerr metric can be performed to percent-level precision or better.