Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Mergers in ASTRID: Predictions for LISA
Abstract
We use the ASTRID cosmological simulation to forecast massive black hole (MBH) mergers detectable by Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) down to . ASTRID directly models MBH dynamical friction, allowing a realistic tracking of their trajectory. It also incorporates relatively low-mass MBH seeds down to , providing a more complete picture of LISA MBH mergers. We find that LISA MBH mergers initially have high eccentricities, peaking around across all redshifts. Accounting for this boosts the event rate from 5.6 yr (if circular orbits are assumed) to 10.5 yr. This enhancement is largely due to additional inspiral sources that will coalesce after LISA's observation, which constitute of detected events.This underscores the importance of LISA's sensitivity to the early inspiral phase, especially for eccentric binaries that emit gravitational waves across a wider frequency band. Most LISA events in ASTRID arise from , low-redshift () and low mass-ratio (-) mergers. Accounting for eccentricity broadens the detectable MBH mass range up to and shifts the peak of detectable mergers to a lower redshift . This implies that the most massive LISA events may also be PTA sources. We predict LISA events to be in various galaxy environments, including many low-mass satellite galaxies. The electromagnetic (EM) counterparts of most LISA sources have active galactic nuclei (AGN) luminosities erg s, albeit only with erg s. The brightest AGN are those associated with the rare LISA/PTA events with .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.24304,
title = {Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Mergers in ASTRID: Predictions for LISA},
author = {Bonny Y. Wang and Yihao Zhou and William Chen and Nianyi Chen and Tiziana Di Matteo and Rupert Croft and Simeon Bird and Yueying Ni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.24304},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
19 Pages, 12 Figures; Published in ApJ