Accreting Double White Dwarf Binaries: Implications for LISA

Kyle Kremer, Katelyn Breivik, Shane L. Larson, Vassiliki Kalogera

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

72 Scopus citations

Abstract

We explore the long-term evolution of mass-transferring white dwarf (WD) binaries undergoing both direct-impact and disk accretion and explore implications of such systems to gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy. We cover a broad range of initial component masses and show that these systems, the majority of which lie within the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) sensitivity range, exhibit prominent negative orbital frequency evolution (chirp) for a significant fraction of their lifetimes. Using a galactic population synthesis, we predict ∼2700 of these systems will be observable with a negative chirp of 0.1 yr-2 by a space-based GW detector like LISA. We also show that detections of mass-transferring double WD systems by LISA may provide astronomers with unique ways of probing the physics governing close compact object binaries.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number95
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume846
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 10 2017

Funding

K.K. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1324585. K.B. and S.L.L. acknowledge support from NASA Grant NNX13AM10G. V.K. acknowledges support from Northwestern University. The majority of our analysis was performed using the computational resources of the Quest high performance computing facility at North-western University, which is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern University Information Technology. Software: BSE (Hurley et al. 2002).

Keywords

  • accretion, accretion disks
  • binaries: general
  • celestial mechanics
  • gravitational waves
  • stars: mass-loss

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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