Gravitational waves from stellar encounters

TL;DR

This paper analyzes gravitational wave emissions from stellar encounters on various orbits, deriving analytical formulas for key quantities and estimating event rates in dense stellar regions like the Galactic Center.

Contribution

It provides new analytical expressions for gravitational wave luminosity, energy output, and amplitude from stellar encounters on different orbits, along with event rate estimates.

Findings

Derived formulas for gravitational wave luminosity and amplitude.

Estimated event rates for stellar encounters in globular clusters.

Predicted detectable event rates at the Galactic Center.

Abstract

The emission of gravitational waves from a system of massive objects interacting on elliptical, hyperbolic and parabolic orbits is studied in the quadrupole approximation. Analytical expressions are then derived for the gravitational wave luminosity, the total energy output and gravitational radiation amplitude. A crude estimate of the expected number of events towards peculiar targets (i.e. globular clusters) is also given. In particular, the rate of events per year is obtained for the dense stellar cluster at the Galactic Center.