Modeling gravitational waves from a small mass plunging into a Kerr black hole

Abstract

Copyright © 2018 by the Editors.All rights reserved. Gravitational waveforms radiated during the inspiral, plunge and merger stages of a small body moving in the equatorial plane of a Kerr black hole can be exploited to get unique, physical information on the strong-field regime. Such waveforms are constructed by numerically solving the Teukolsky equation in the time domain. When building the source term for the gravitational perturbations, one models the dissipation of orbital energy using the Teukolsky frequency-domain gravitational-wave flux for circular, equatorial orbits, down to the light-ring. The merger features of the Teukolsky waveforms have proven to be instrumental to extending the effective-one-body model of spinning, nonprecessing black-hole binaries, from the comparable-mass to the test-particle limit.