A Systematic Search for Short-period Close White Dwarf Binary Candidates Based on Gaia EDR3 Catalog and Zwicky Transient Facility Data

TL;DR

This study systematically identifies 429 candidate short-period white dwarf binaries using Gaia EDR3 and Zwicky Transient Facility data, estimating their gravitational wave signals and potential detectability by space-based GW detectors.

Contribution

It introduces a large sample of CWDB candidates from Gaia and ZTF data, including classification and GW signal estimation, expanding the known potential verification binaries.

Findings

429 CWDB candidates identified

Six potential GW sources detectable by LISA

Eclipsing and ellipsoidal binary classifications

Abstract

Galactic short-period close white dwarf binaries (CWDBs) are important objects for space-borne gravitational-wave (GW) detectors in the millihertz frequency bands. Due to the intrinsically low luminosity, only about 25 identified CWDBs are detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), which are also known as verification binaries (VBs). The Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) provids a catalog containing a large number of CWDB candidates, which also includes parallax and photometry measurements. We crossmatch the Gaia EDR3 and Zwicky Transient Facility public data release 8, and apply period-finding algorithms to obtain a sample of periodic variables. The phase-folded light curves are inspected, and finally we obtain a binary sample containing 429 CWDB candidates. We further classify the samples into eclipsing binaries (including 58 HW Vir-type binaries, 65 EA-type binaries, 56 EB-type binaries, and 41 EW-type binaries) and ellipsoidal variations (209 ELL-type binaries). We discovered four ultrashort period binary candidates with unique light-curve shapes. We estimate the GW amplitude of all of our binary candidates, and calculate the corresponding signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) for TianQin and LISA. We find two (six) potential GW candidates with S/Ns greater than 5 in the nominal mission time of TianQin (LISA), which increases the total number of candidate VBs for TianQin (LISA) to 18 (31).