Inspiralling Binary merger parameter reconstruction with lunar and satellite Laser Ranging
Abstract
Precision tracking of Earth--Moon and Earth--satellite ranges offers a novel, low-frequency avenue for detecting gravitational waves from inspiralling massive black hole binaries, complementary to space-based interferometers. In this paper, we propose a first study of the reconstruction of the binary parameters from a synthetic set of range observations. \textit{Set-up}: Assuming an ideal unperturbed Keplerian motion for the earth-satellite binary, we develop a framework for reconstructing the chirp mass ℳc and luminosity distance DL of chirping sources from the perturbations they induce on ranging observables, using both Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) and a two-satellite ranging configuration (GUEST) as concrete case studies. \textit{Result}: We find that chirp-mass recovery tightly converges as a power law in SNR (σMc/Mc ∝ SNRα, α≃ −1 to −1.8) for both LLR and GUEST. In contrast, the luminosity distance suffers from a severe, SNR-independent degeneracy with the sky-orientation angles in the LLR configuration, yielding fractional biases and uncertainties of tens to over a hundred percent regardless of signal strength. The two-satellite GUEST configuration breaks this degeneracy and restores a convergent, SNR-dependent recovery of DL comparable in scaling to that of the chirp mass. These results demonstrate that multi-baseline ranging architectures are essential for extracting luminosity-distance information from ranging-based gravitational wave searches, while chirp-mass measurements remain reliably accessible even with a single ranging baseline such as the Earth--Moon system.
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BibTeX
@misc{vanvlasselaer2026inspiralling,
title = {{Inspiralling Binary merger parameter reconstruction with lunar and satellite Laser Ranging}},
author = {Miguel Vanvlasselaer},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.28753},
eprint = {2608.28753},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28753},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Inspiralling Binary merger parameter reconstruction with lunar and satellite Laser Ranging
AU - Miguel Vanvlasselaer
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.28753
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28753
AB - Precision tracking of Earth--Moon and Earth--satellite ranges offers a novel, low-frequency avenue for detecting gravitational waves from inspiralling massive black hole binaries, complementary to space-based interferometers. In this paper, we propose a first study of the reconstruction of the binary parameters from a synthetic set of range observations. \textit{Set-up}: Assuming an ideal unperturbed Keplerian motion for the earth-satellite binary, we develop a framework for reconstructing the chirp mass ℳ_c and luminosity distance D_L of chirping sources from the perturbations they induce on ranging observables, using both Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) and a two-satellite ranging configuration (GUEST) as concrete case studies. \textit{Result}: We find that chirp-mass recovery tightly converges as a power law in SNR (σ_M_c/M_c ∝ SNR^α, α≃ −1 to −1.8) for both LLR and GUEST. In contrast, the luminosity distance suffers from a severe, SNR-independent degeneracy with the sky-orientation angles in the LLR configuration, yielding fractional biases and uncertainties of tens to over a hundred percent regardless of signal strength. The two-satellite GUEST configuration breaks this degeneracy and restores a convergent, SNR-dependent recovery of D_L comparable in scaling to that of the chirp mass. These results demonstrate that multi-baseline ranging architectures are essential for extracting luminosity-distance information from ranging-based gravitational wave searches, while chirp-mass measurements remain reliably accessible even with a single ranging baseline such as the Earth--Moon system.
ER -