Gravitational Waves from Double White Dwarfs as probes of the Milky Way @LISAcommunity

Uploaded July 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

LISA will be able to detect and resolve a great number of ultra compact stellar-mass binaries in the Milky Way. In particular, LISA will resolve around O(10^4) such binaries, mostly Double White Dwarfs (DWD), whereas the remaining sources will generate a confusion foreground signal. In this talk, I will present a framework to infer the total stellar galactic mass, by analyzing the spectral shape and amplitude of the confusion foreground signal. For a fixed population evolution model, we are able to retrieve percentage-level relative errors on the total mass. In the same spirit, we will discuss that variations in the galactic shape - for scale heights less than 500 pc - are not distinguishable based on the stochastic signal alone. Finally, by simulating the resolvable sources which we can extract from the LISA data, we show how we can reconstruct the DWD population properties, such as the DWD emission frequency, the coalescence time and chirp mass distributions.

Authors: Maria Georgousi, Nikolaos Karnesis, Valeriya Korol, Mauro Pieroni, Nikolaos Stergioulas
Presenter: Maria Georgousi

Gravitational Waves from Double White Dwarfs as probes of the Milky Way

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