Previous | Session 102 | Next | Author Index | Block Schedule
K. Gultekin, M. C. Miller, D. P. Hamilton (U. of Maryland, College Park)
We present numerical three-body experiments that include the effects of gravitational radiation reaction by using equations of motion that include the 2.5-order post-Newtonian force terms, which are the leading order terms of energy loss from gravitational waves. Building on previous work, we simulate sequences of high-mass-ratio three-body encounters as they would occur in a dense stellar system. The simulations show that the binaries merge with extremely high eccentricity such that when the gravitational waves are detectable by LISA, most of the binaries will have eccentricities e > 0.9 though all will have circularized by the time they are detectable by LIGO. We also investigate the implications for the formation and growth of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) and find that the inclusion of gravitational waves during the encounter results in roughly half as many black holes ejected from the host cluster for each black hole accreted onto the growing IMBH.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.astro.umd.edu/~kayhan/research.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
Previous | Session 102 | Next
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.