Massive black hole remnants of the first stars III: observational signatures from the past

Abstract

The first stars forming in minihaloes at redshifts greater than 20 may have been very massive and could have left behind massive black hole (MBH) remnants. In previous papers we investigated the hierarchical merging of these `seed' MBHs and their associated haloes, using a semi-analytical approach consisting of a hierarchical merger tree algorithm and explicit prescriptions for the dynamics of merged substructure inside a larger host halo following a merger. We also estimated accretion luminosities for these MBHs and found them to be consistent with observations of ultra-luminous X-ray point sources. Here we compute the strength of gravitational wave events as MBHs merge to grow from seed mass MBH at high redshifts to those that we predict to reside in galaxy haloes today. If MBHs merge efficiently we predict that some 10^4 - 10^5 events per year could be observed, that fall just within the sensitivity limits of the proposed LISA gravitational wave observatory. The collapse of the first massive stars to form MBHs may be accompanied by gamma ray bursts (GRBs). If this is the case and GRBs are in principle observable out to the redshifts of first star formation, we find that about 10^5 - 10^6 GRBs per year could be detected. As merging MBH binaries reach their last stable orbits before final coalescence a fraction of the gravitational wave energy may be released as a pulse of gamma rays (for instance, through interaction with material enveloping a merging MBH binary). This fraction has to be in the range between 10^{-14} - 10^{-10} for MBH mergers to be less luminous than GBRs, yet detectable out to cosmological distances with upcoming GRB detector missions.