Search results for "Massive compact halo object"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Gravitational Waves from the Merging of White Dwarfs
2003
Binary white dwarfs emit gravitational waves with frequencies of up to a few mHz. As a consequence of the loss of angular momentum both components gradually approach and the gravitational waves emitted by the system increase both in amplitude and frequency (it is said that they chirp). In fact, the chirp of the galactic white dwarf binary population is expected to be the dominant source of noise at low frequencies. A fraction of these binaries, those separated by a distance smaller than roughly three solar radii, will eventually merge in a time shorter than a Hubble time. It is expected that during the merging they will emit gravitational waves transporting extremely valuable information ab…
Looking for MACHOs in the Spectra of Fast Radio Bursts
2019
We explore a novel search strategy for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) such as primordial black holes or dense mini-halos in the mass range from $10^{-4}$ to 0.1 solar masses. These objects can gravitationally lens the signal of fast radio bursts (FRBs), producing a characteristic interference pattern in the frequency spectrum, similar to the previously studied femtolensing signal in gamma ray burst spectra. Unlike traditional searches using microlensing, FRB lensing will probe the abundance of MACHOs at cosmological distance scales (~Gpc) rather than just their distribution in the neighborhood of the Milky Way. The method is thus particularly relevant for d…
Search for Subsolar-Mass Ultracompact Binaries in Advanced LIGO's First Observing Run
2018
We present the first Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo search for ultracompact binary systems with component masses between 0.2 $M_\odot$ - 1.0 $M_\odot$ using data taken between September 12, 2015 and January 19, 2016. We find no viable gravitational wave candidates. Our null result constrains the coalescence rate of monochromatic (delta function) distributions of non-spinning (0.2 $M_\odot$, 0.2 $M_\odot$) ultracompact binaries to be less than $1.0 \times 10^6 \text{Gpc}^{-3} \text{yr}^{-1}$ and the coalescence rate of a similar distribution of (1.0 $M_\odot$, 1.0 $M_\odot$) ultracompact binaries to be less than $1.9 \times 10^4 \text{Gpc}^{-3} \text{yr}^{-1}$ (at 90 percent confidence). N…