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 language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 95 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
| Volume | 846 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 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