SCYON Abstract

Received on July 23 2001

Monte Carlo cluster simulations to determine the rate of compact star inspiraling to a central galactic black hole

Authors	M. Freitag^{1, 2}
Affiliation	¹ Observatoire de Genève, CH-1290 Sauverny, Switzerland ² Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
To appear in	the proceedings of the Third LISA Symposium, IoP Publishing (Classical and Quantum Gravity), ed. B. Schutz
Contact	marc.freitag@obs.unige.ch
URL	http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0107193
Links

Abstract

The capture and gradual inspiral of stellar mass objects by a massive black hole at the centre of a galaxy has been proposed as one of the most promising source of gravitational radiation to be detected by LISA. Unfortunately rate estimates for this process suffer from many uncertainties. Here we report on the use of our newly developed Monte Carlo stellar dynamics code to tackle this problem. We present results from simple galactic nuclei models that demonstrate the high potential of our approach and point out the aspects of the problem where an improved treatment seems desirable.