English

LISA verification binaries with updated distances from Gaia Data Release 2

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2018-06-27 v2

Abstract

Ultracompact binaries with orbital periods less than a few hours will dominate the gravitational wave signal in the mHz regime. Until recently, 10 systems were expected have a predicted gravitational wave signal strong enough to be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the so-called `verification binaries'. System parameters, including distances, are needed to provide an accurate prediction of the expected gravitational wave strength to be measured by LISA. Using parallaxes from {\sl Gaia} Data Release 2 we calculate signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) for \approx50 verification binary candidates. We find that 11 binaries reach a SNR\geq20, two further binaries reaching a SNR\geq5 and three more systems are expected to have a SNR\approx5 after four years integration with LISA. For these 16 systems we present predictions of the gravitational wave amplitude (A\mathcal{A}) and parameter uncertainties from Fisher information matrix on the amplitude (A\mathcal{A}) and inclination (ι\iota).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.00482,
  title  = {LISA verification binaries with updated distances from Gaia Data Release 2},
  author = {T. Kupfer and V. Korol and S. Shah and G. Nelemans and T. R. Marsh and G. Ramsay and P. J. Groot and D. T. H Steeghs and E. M. Rossi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.00482},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

accepted for publication in MNRAS, 9 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:41:59.344Z