Spoiler alert: this paper is a bit sad.
Stellar-mass black-hole binaries are now detected by LIGO on a weekly basis. It would be really cool if LISA (a future space mission targeting low-frequencies gravitational waves) could see them as well. We could do a lot of cool stuff, in both the astro and the theory side of things. In today’s paper, we try to figure out how easy or hard it will be to extract these signals from the LISA noise. Well, it’s hard. In terms of the minimum signal-to-noise ratio required, we find that this is as high as 15. The number of expected detection becomes discouragingly low unless the detector behaves a bit better at high frequencies or black holes with 100 solar masses start floating around.