Science opportunities of wet extreme mass-ratio inspirals

Wet extreme mass-ratio inspirals (wet EMRIs), which arise from stellar-mass black holes inspiral into supermassive black holes (SMBHs) within the gas-rich environments of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), are primary sources of gravitational waves (GWs) for space-borne detectors like LISA, TianQin, and Taiji. Unlike "dry EMRIs", which form through gravitational scattering in nuclear star clusters, wet EMRIs are naturally accompanied by interactions with accretion disks, offering rich multi-messenger science opportunities. They are distinct in generating transient electromagnetic (EM) signals, such as quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs), which serve as valuable probes of accretion disk physics and SMBH environments.…

• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• CI
  California Institute of Technology
• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Award: 12573048
• DU
  Dalian University of Technology
• FR
  Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities