Gravitational waves from coalescing massive black holes in young dense clusters

Abstract

HST observations reveal that young massive star clusters form in gas‐rich environments like the Antennae galaxy which will merge in collisional processes to form larger structures. These clusters amalgamate and if some of these clusters harbour a massive black hole in their centres, they can become a strong source of gravitational waves when they coalesce. In order to understand the dynamical processes that are into play in such a scenario, one has to carefully study the evolution of the merger of two of such young massive star clusters and more specifically their respective massive black holes. This will be a promising source of gravitational waves for both, LISA and the proposed Big Bang Observer (BBO), whose first purpose is to search for an inflation‐generated gravitational waves background in the frequency range of 10−1 – 1 Hz. We used high‐resolution direct summation N‐body simulations to study the orbital evolution of two colliding globular clusters with different initial conditions. Even if the fin...