Why are LIGO and Virgo not mechanically capable of detecting the collisions of supermassive black holes?
Is it because the amplitude is so big it "pegs the needle" above its limit?
Is it because the amplitude is so big it "pegs the needle" above its limit?
It now makes perfect sense to me that more massive objects wouldn't revolve quickly enough to create high frequency waves.
The ground-based detectors are most sensitive at 100Hz, which is around the frequency of the binary black hole inspiral. Supermassive black holes are more like millihertz. We do not have any concrete way yet to measure the gravitational waves from supermassive black holes, but there are some ideas. For example we can look at the time dilation of frequencies of nearby pulsars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar) as a kind of gravitational wave interferometer in space, however to get a signal-to-noise ratio greater than one many years (decades) of data is needed.