Enhanced power of gravitational waves and rapid coalescence of black hole binaries through k-essence dark energy accretion

We consider the accretion of dark energy by constituent black holes in binary formations during the present epoch of the Universe. In the context of an observationally consistent dark energy model, we evaluate the growth of black holes' masses due to accretion. However, the accretion rate may turn out to be too high if this model is naively applied to supermassive black holes. We show that the accretion leads to faster circularization of the binary orbits. We compute the average power of the gravitational waves emitted from binaries, which exhibits a considerable enhancement due to the effect of growth of masses as a result of accretion. This in turn, leads to a significant reduction of the coalescence time of the binaries. We present examples pertaining to various choices of the initial masses of the black holes in the stellar mass range and above, in order to clearly establish a possible observational signature of dark energy in the emerging era of gravitational wave astronomy.