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Phys. Rev. D 60, 083512 (1999) [22 pages]

Low frequency gravitational waves from black hole MACHO binaries

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Kunihito Ioka
Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan

Takahiro Tanaka
Department of Earth and Space Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka 560, Japan

Takashi Nakamura
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan

Received 30 September 1998; published 24 September 1999

The intensity of low frequency gravitational waves from black hole MACHO binaries is studied. First we estimate the gravitational wave background produced by black hole MACHO binaries in the Milky Way halo as well as the cosmological gravitational wave background produced by the extragalactic black hole MACHO binaries. It is found that the cosmological gravitational wave background due to black hole MACHO binaries is larger than the halo background unless an extreme model of the halo is assumed, while it is smaller than the background due to close white dwarf binaries at νgw≲10-2.5 Hz if the actual space density of white dwarfs is maximal. This cosmological background due to black hole MACHO binaries is well below the observational constraints from the pulsar timing, quasar proper motions and so on. We find that one year observation by LISA will be able to detect gravitational waves from at least several hundreds of nearby independent black hole MACHO binaries whose amplitudes exceed these backgrounds. This suggests that LISA will be able to pin down various properties of primordial black hole MACHOs together with the results of LIGO-VIRGO-TAMA-GEO network. Furthermore, it may be possible to draw a map of the mass distribution of our halo, since LISA can determine the position and the distance to individual sources consisting of black hole MACHO binaries. Therefore, LISA may open a new field of the gravitational wave astronomy.

© 1999 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.60.083512
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.60.083512
PACS:
98.80.-k, 04.30.-w, 95.35.+d, 97.60.Lf