Gravitational waves production from stellar encounters around massive black holes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes gravitational wave emission from stellar encounters around massive black holes, deriving analytical formulas and estimating event rates in dense stellar environments like the Galactic Center.

Contribution

It provides new analytical expressions for gravitational wave luminosity and estimates event rates for stellar encounters near massive black holes.

Findings

Derived formulas for gravitational wave luminosity and energy output.

Estimated event rates for stellar encounters in dense clusters.

Applied results to the Galactic Center environment.

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.