Opportunistic search for continuous gravitational waves from compact objects in long-period binaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to constrain continuous gravitational wave amplitudes from compact objects in long-period binary systems by leveraging existing all-sky search results, avoiding the need for computationally intensive dedicated binary searches.

Contribution

It presents an opportunistic approach that uses previous isolated source search results to set limits on binary systems without explicit binary searches, expanding the parameter space explored.

Findings

Limits are more constraining than previous upper limits for unknown binaries.

The method covers a large, unexplored range of binary orbital parameters.

It avoids the high computational cost of dedicated binary searches.

Abstract

Most all-sky searches for continuous gravitational waves assume the source to be isolated. In this paper, we allow for an unknown companion object in a long-period orbit and opportunistically use previous results from an all-sky search for isolated sources to constrain the continuous gravitational wave amplitude over a large and unexplored range of binary orbital parameters without explicitly performing a dedicated search for binary systems. The resulting limits are significantly more constraining than any existing upper limit for unknown binary systems, albeit the latter apply to different orbital parameter ranges that are computationally much costlier to explore.