First LIGO events: Binary black holes mergings

Oct, 1996
15 pages
Published in:
  • New Astron. 2 (1997) 43
e-Print:
Experiments:

Citations per year

1997200420112018202301234567
Abstract: (arXiv)
Based on evolutionary scenarios for binary stellar evolution we study the merging rates of relativistic binary stars (NS+NS, NS+BH, BH+BH) under different assumptions of BH formation. We find the BH+BH merging rate in the range one per 200,000 -- 500,000 year in a Milky-Way type galaxy, while the NS+NS merging rate RnsR_{ns} is approximately 10 times as high, which means that the expected event rate even for high mean kick velocities of NS up to 400 km/s is at least 30-50 binary NS mergings per year from within a distance of 200 Mpc. As typical BH is formed with a mass 3-10 times the NS mass (assumed 1.4 M_\odot), the rates obtained imply that the expected detection rate of binary BH by a LIGO-type gravitational wave detector is 10-100 times higher than the binary NS merging rate for a wide range of parameters.