Prospects of eLISA for Detecting Galactic Binary Black Holes Similar to GW150914

TL;DR

This paper evaluates eLISA's potential to detect and analyze Galactic binary black holes similar to GW150914, highlighting its ability to measure eccentricity and inform formation theories.

Contribution

It presents a detailed assessment of eLISA's detection prospects for GW150914-like BBHs and introduces a scaling relation for their expected Galactic detection rate.

Findings

eLISA can identify at least one BBH with high confidence.

eLISA can measure small eccentricities down to e~0.02.

A simple scaling relation for Galactic BBH detection is derived.

Abstract

We discuss the prospects of eLISA for detecting gravitational waves (GWs) from Galactic binary black holes (BBHs) similar to GW150914. For a comoving merger rate that is consistent with current observation, eLISA is likely to identify at least one BBH with a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, eLISA has a potential to measure the eccentricity of the BBH as small as $e\sim 0.02$, corresponding to the residual value $e\sim 10^{-6}$ at 10Hz. Therefore, eLISA could provide us with a crucial information to understand the formation processes of relatively massive BBHs like GW150914. We also derive a simple scaling relation for the expected number of detectable Galactic BBHs.