Science Potential for Stellar-mass Black Holes as Neighbors of Sgr A*

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of using stellar-mass black holes near Sgr A* as gravitational wave sources for LISA, exploring their dynamics, interactions, and implications for measuring the black hole's spin and dark matter effects.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of using stellar-mass black holes near Sgr A* as probes for gravitational wave detection and black hole spin measurement, considering dark matter and axion cloud effects.

Findings

Orbital precession can reveal Sgr A*'s spin.

Dark matter causes small measurable phase shifts.

Axion clouds may influence gravitational wave signals.

Abstract

It has been suggested that there is possibly a class of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) residing near (distance $\le 10^3 M$) the galactic center massive black hole, Sgr A*. Possible formation scenarios include the mass segregation of massive stellar-mass black holes and/or the disk migration if there was an active accretion flow near Sgr A* within $\mathcal{O}(10)$ Myr. In this work, we explore the application of this type of objects as sources of space-borne gravitational wave detectors, such as Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). We find it is possible to probe the spin of Sgr A* based on the precession of the orbital planes of these stellar-mass black holes moving around Sgr A*. We also show that the dynamical friction produced by accumulated cold dark matter near Sgr A* generally produces small measurable phase shift in the gravitational waveform. In the case that there is an axion cloud near Sgr A*, the dynamical friction induced modification to gravitational waveform is measurable only if the mass of the axion field is in a narrow range of the mass spectrum. Gravitational interaction between the axion cloud and the stellar-mass black holes may introduce additional precession around the spin of Sgr A*. This additional precession rate is generally weaker than the spin-induced Lense-Thirring precession rate, but nevertheless may contaminate the spin measurement in a certain parameter regime. At last, we point out that the multi-body gravitational interaction between these stellar-mass black holes generally causes negligible phase shift during the LISA lifetime.