Gravitational waves from stars orbiting the massive black hole at the Galactic center
Abstract
The LISA mission, a 5 million km-base space-borne LASER interferometer to be launched around year 2010, will detect gravitational waves emitted by Galactic and extra-galactic sources. It has been predicted that one of the main astrophysical processes leading to strong emission in the LISA frequency band is the capture of a compact star by a black hole with a mass of a few million solar masses in the center of a galaxy. Main sequence stars were thought not to contribute because they are disrupted by tidal forces before they plunge through the horizon. Here we show that, according to our simulations of the stellar dynamics of the Sgr A* cluster, there must be one to a few low-mass main sequence stars sufficiently bound to the central Galactic black hole to be conspicuous sources in LISA observations. The probability that a white dwarf may be detectable is lower than 0.5 and, in spite of mass segregation, detection of a captured neutron star or stellar black hole in the center of the Milky Way is highly unlikely.Keywords
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