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Pau Amaro Seoane

Publications and source records attributed to Pau Amaro Seoane.

42 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

The young stars in the Galactic Center

We present a large ${\sim 30" \times 30"}$ spectroscopic survey of the Galactic Center using the SINFONI IFU at the VLT. Combining observations of the last two decades we compile spectra of over $2800$ stars. Using the Bracket-$γ$ absorption lines we identify $195$ young stars, extending the list of known young stars by $79$. In order to explore the angular momentum distribution of the young stars, we introduce an isotropic cluster prior. This prior reproduces an isotropic cluster in a mathematically exact way, which we test through numerical simulations. We calculate the posterior angular momentum space as function of projected separation from Sgr~A*. We find that the observed young star distribution is substantially different from an isotropic cluster. We identify the previously reported feature of the clockwise disk and find that its angular momentum changes as function of separation from the black hole, and thus confirm a warp of the clockwise disk ($p \sim 99.2\%$). At large separations, we discover three prominent overdensities of angular momentum. One overdensity has been reported previously, the counter-clockwise disk. The other two are new. Determining the likely members of these structures, we find that as many as $75\%$ of stars can be associated with one of these features. Stars belonging to the warped clockwise-disk show a top heavy K-band luminosity function, while stars belonging to the larger separation features do not. Our observations are in good agreement with the predictions of simulations of in-situ star formation, and argue for common formation of these structures.

astro-ph.GA↗

The Effect of Mission Duration on LISA Science Objectives

The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4 yr continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of $\approx 0.75$, which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 yr. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission. We find that the science investigations most affected by mission duration concern the search for seed black holes at cosmic dawn, as well as the study of stellar-origin black holes and of their formation channels via multi-band and multi-messenger observations. We conclude that an extension to 6 yr of mission operations is recommended.

astro-ph.IM↗

Excitation of gravitational wave modes by a center-of-mass velocity of the source

Most gravitational wave (GW) sources are moving relative to us. This motion is often closely related to the environment of the source and can thus provide crucial information about the formation of the source and its host. Recently, LIGO and Virgo detected for the first time the subdominant modes of GWs. We show that a motion of the center-of-mass of the source can affect these modes, where the effect is proportional to the velocity of the source. The effect on the GW modes in turn affects the overall frequency of the GW, thus leading to a phase shift. We study the impact of this effect on LIGO/Virgo detections and show that it is detectable for sources with high mass ratios and inclinations. This effect breaks the degeneracy between mass and Doppler shift in GW observations, and opens a new possibility of detecting the motion of a GW source even for constant velocities.

astro-ph.CO↗

Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the Cluster Monte Carlo Code

We describe the public release of the Cluster Monte Carlo Code (CMC) a parallel, star-by-star $N$-body code for modeling dense star clusters. CMC treats collisional stellar dynamics using Hénon's method, where the cumulative effect of many two-body encounters is statistically reproduced as a single effective encounter between nearest-neighbor particles on a relaxation timescale. The star-by-star approach allows for the inclusion of additional physics, including strong gravitational three- and four-body encounters, two-body tidal and gravitational-wave captures, mass loss in arbitrary galactic tidal fields, and stellar evolution for both single and binary stars. The public release of CMC is pinned directly to the COSMIC population synthesis code, allowing dynamical star cluster simulations and population synthesis studies to be performed using identical assumptions about the stellar physics and initial conditions. As a demonstration, we present two examples of star cluster modeling: first, we perform the largest ($N = 10^8$) star-by-star $N$-body simulation of a Plummer sphere evolving to core collapse, reproducing the expected self-similar density profile over more than 15 orders of magnitude; second, we generate realistic models for typical globular clusters, and we show that their dynamical evolution can produce significant numbers of black hole mergers with masses greater than those produced from isolated binary evolution (such as GW190521, a recently reported merger with component masses in the pulsational pair-instability mass gap).

astro-ph.GA↗

Gravitational radiation pulses from Extreme-Mass-Ratio-Inspiral system with a supermassive boson star

Future space-borne gravitational-wave detectors will observe the gravitational waves in the milli-Hz. Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals with central supermassive black holes are very important sources that could provide the information of the vicinity of black holes. The event horizon separates the inner region of a black hole and there is nothing that can escape from this region. When the central supermassive compact object is a regular and horizonless rotating boson star, a small body could pass through the center and follow novel types of orbits. These will generate the gravitational waves that can not be obtained in the scenario corresponding to an extreme-mass-ratio inspiral with a central supermassive black hole. This can be used to examine whether a supermassive rotating boson star is present at the centers of galaxies. In this work, we consider an extreme-mass-ratio inspiral system described by a small compact object inspiralling into a central supermassive rotating boson star. Integrating four types of special equatorial geodesics and using the numerical kludge method with quadrupole approximation, we obtain the corresponding gravitational waveforms and find that there are high-frequency gravitational radiation pulses in such system. The frequencies of the gravitational radiation pulses could be in the magnitude of $10^{-1}$Hz and the whole gravitational wave parts are in the milli-Hz. By assuming the masses of the central supermassive rotating boson star and small compact object to be $10^6 M_\odot$ and $10 M_\odot$ and assuming a distance of $1\text{Gpc}$, we show that the gravitational radiation pulses could be detected by the space-borne gravitational-wave detectors. Our results will provide a possible evidence to distinguish the astrophysical compact objects in the galactic centers.

gr-qc↗

Exciting modes due to the aberration of gravitational waves: Measurability for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals

Gravitational waves from a source moving relative to us can suffer from special-relativistic effects such as aberration. The required velocities for these to be significant are on the order of $1000\,\textrm{km s}^{-1}$. This value corresponds to the velocity dispersion that one finds in clusters of galaxies. Hence, we expect a large number of gravitational-wave sources to have such effects imprinted in their signals. In particular, the signal from a moving source will have its higher modes excited, i.e., $(3,3)$ and beyond. We derive expressions describing this effect, and study its measurability for the specific case of a circular, non-spinning extreme-mass-ratio inspiral. We find that the excitation of higher modes by a peculiar velocity of $1000\,\textrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ is detectable for such inspirals with signal-to-noise ratios of $\gtrsim20$. Using a Fisher matrix analysis, we show that the velocity of the source can be measured to a precision of just a few percent for a signal-to-noise ratio of 100. If the motion of the source is ignored parameter estimates could be biased, e.g., the estimated masses of the components through a Doppler shift. Conversely, by including this effect in waveform models, we could measure the velocity dispersion of clusters of galaxies at distances inaccessible to light.

gr-qc↗