Gravitational waves radiated by magnetic galactic binaries and detection by LISA

TL;DR

This paper explores how magnetic properties and eccentricity in galactic binary systems influence gravitational wave signals detected by LISA, highlighting the potential to identify magnetism through frequency peak analysis.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical framework to assess the impact of magnetism and eccentricity on gravitational wave signals from galactic binaries for LISA detection.

Findings

Magnetism causes shifts in GW frequency peaks.

Eccentricity introduces additional harmonic peaks.

LISA can detect magnetism through peak measurements.

Abstract

In the context of the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, galactic binary systems of white dwarfs and neutron stars will represent the dominant source of Gravitational Waves (GWs) within the $10^{-4}-10^{-1}\,\mathrm{Hz}$ frequency band. It is expected that LISA will measure simultaneously, the GWs from more than ten thousands of these compact galactic binaries. The analysis of such a superposition of signals will represent one of the greatest challenge for the mission. Currently, in the LISA Datacode Challenge, each galactic binary is modeled as a quasi-monochromatic source of GWs. This corresponds to the circular motion of two point-masses at the 2.5 post-Newtonian approximation. If this picture is expected to be an accurate description for most of the galactic binaries that LSIA will detect, we nevertheless expect to observe eccentric systems with complex physical properties beyond the point-mass approximation. In this work, we investigate how a binary system of highly magnetic objects in quasi-circular orbit could affect the quasi-monochromatic picture of the GW signal detected by LISA. We demonstrate that the eccentricity generates additional frequency peaks at harmonics of the mean motion and that magnetism is responsible for shifting each frequency peak with respect to the case without magnetism. We provide analytical estimates and argue that LISA will be able to detect magnetism if it can measure the main peaks at two and three times the mean motion with a sufficient accuracy.