Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereid
If LIGO/VIRGO detected an 'inspiral' signature, to what extent would that be considered a possible probe of the strong field regime?
|
Three quick comments:
1. To prevent misunderstanding by those who haven't read the papers I cited: gtr makes quite specific quantitative predictions for the late stage inspiral of (say) a pair of closely orbiting black holes; the "chirp-burst-ringdown-expdecay" scenario is not simply qualitative. Thus, verification of these features for dozens of mergers of
stellar-mass black holes would provide strong evidence that gtr remains accurate at curvatures encountered at the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole.
2. Black hole mergers do begin to probe the nonlinear regime.
3.
Supermassive black holes have
smaller curvatures near their horizon than stellar-mass black holes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereid
Question for astronomers: out to z ~6 (say), what is the expected rate of SMBH-SMBH merger/coalescence? How tightly can the upper and lower bounds be specified, today (perhaps as a function of z)?
|
There are several surveys on the arXiv on expected sources of gravitational radiation, at least one of which should contain the information you seek.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereid
IIRC, the Einstein@Home science forum has an estimate of the distance out to which one kind of inspiral could be detected, if it happened while LIGO was 'up', but I can't find it any more  Does anyone know how what that distance is? |
There are a number of parameters which are relevant besides distance, e.g. all ground based detectors are sensitive only with a certain frequency band; space based detectors such as LISA should be sensitive in a different band. (See the surveys for details.) But in general terms, next generation LIGO/VIRGO should be capable of detecting gravitational radiation from very distant and very violent events.