Effects of proper motion of neutron stars on continuous gravitational-wave searches

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the proper motion of neutron stars impacts continuous gravitational-wave searches, identifying conditions where neglecting proper motion may reduce detection sensitivity and affect parameter estimation accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effects of neutron star proper motion on continuous gravitational-wave searches and delineates the parameter space where these effects are significant.

Findings

Proper motion can significantly affect signal detection in certain parameter regimes.

Neglecting proper motion may lead to reduced sensitivity and biased parameter estimates.

The study quantifies the uncertainty in proper motion estimation achievable by current searches.

Abstract

All-sky and directed continuous gravitational-wave searches look for signals from unknown asymmetric rotating neutron stars. These searches do not take into account the proper motion of the neutron star, assuming that the loss of signal-to-noise ratio caused by this is negligible and that no biases in parameter estimation are introduced. In this paper we study the effect that proper motion has on continuous wave searches, and we show for what regions of parameter space (frequency, proper motion, sky position) and observation times this assumption may not be valid. We also calculate the relative uncertainty on the proper motion parameter estimation that these searches can achieve.