TY - JOUR
T1 - Probing Supermassive Black Hole Seed Scenarios with Gravitational-wave Measurements
AU - Fairbairn, Malcolm
AU - Ellis, John
AU - Vaskonen, Ville
AU - Urrutia, Juan
N1 - Funding Information:
The work of J.E. was supported by the United Kingdom STFC grants ST/X000753/1 and ST/T00679X/1, and that of M.F. was also supported by the United Kingdom STFC grant ST/X000753/1. The work of J.U. and V.V. was supported by European Regional Development Fund through the CoE program grant TK202 and by the Estonian Research Council grant PRG803. The work of V.V. was also partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101065736.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024. The Author(s).
PY - 2024/3/11
Y1 - 2024/3/11
N2 - The process whereby the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) populating the centers of galaxies have been assembled remains to be established, with the relative importance of seeds provided by collapsed Population III stars, black holes formed in nuclear star clusters via repeated mergers, or direct collapses of protogalactic disks yet to be determined. In this paper we study the prospects for casting light on this issue by future measurements of gravitational waves emitted during the inspirals and mergers of pairs of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), discussing in particular the roles of prospective measurements by LISA and the proposed atom interferometers AION and AEDGE. We find that the expected number of detectable IMBH binaries is O(100) for LISA and AEDGE and O(10) for AION in low-mass seeds scenarios and goes down to O(10) for LISA and below one for AEDGE and AION in high-mass seed scenarios. This allows all of these observatories to probe the parameters of the seed model, in particular, if at least a fraction of the SMBHs arises from a low-mass seed population. We also show that the measurement accuracy of the binary parameters is, in general, best for AEDGE, which sees very precisely the merger of the binary.
AB - The process whereby the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) populating the centers of galaxies have been assembled remains to be established, with the relative importance of seeds provided by collapsed Population III stars, black holes formed in nuclear star clusters via repeated mergers, or direct collapses of protogalactic disks yet to be determined. In this paper we study the prospects for casting light on this issue by future measurements of gravitational waves emitted during the inspirals and mergers of pairs of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), discussing in particular the roles of prospective measurements by LISA and the proposed atom interferometers AION and AEDGE. We find that the expected number of detectable IMBH binaries is O(100) for LISA and AEDGE and O(10) for AION in low-mass seeds scenarios and goes down to O(10) for LISA and below one for AEDGE and AION in high-mass seed scenarios. This allows all of these observatories to probe the parameters of the seed model, in particular, if at least a fraction of the SMBHs arises from a low-mass seed population. We also show that the measurement accuracy of the binary parameters is, in general, best for AEDGE, which sees very precisely the merger of the binary.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85187950308&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ad27d5
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ad27d5
M3 - Article
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 964
SP - 11
EP - 18
JO - ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
JF - ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
IS - 1
M1 - 11
ER -