Evaluating the gravitational wave detectability of globular clusters and the Magellanic Clouds for LISA

TL;DR

This study simulates populations of compact binaries in the Magellanic Clouds and globular clusters to assess their detectability by LISA, revealing significant differences from previous models due to stellar evolution code variations.

Contribution

It provides new predictions for LISA-detectable sources in specific environments using BPASS, highlighting the impact of stellar evolution modeling choices.

Findings

Magellanic Clouds may have a few detectable sources each

Globular clusters likely have fewer than one detectable source

Differences in stellar evolution codes cause order-of-magnitude discrepancies

Abstract

We use the stellar evolution code BPASS and the gravitational wave simulation code LEGWORK to simulate populations of compact binaries that may be detected by the in-development space-based gravitational wave (GW) detector LISA. Specifically, we simulate the Magellanic Clouds and binary populations mimicking several globular clusters, neglecting dynamical effects. We find that the Magellanic Clouds would have a handful of detectable sources each, but for globular clusters the amount of detectable sources would be less than one. We compare our results to earlier research and find that our predicted numbers are several tens of times lower than calculations using the stellar evolution code BSE that take dynamical effects into account, but also calculations using the stellar evolution code SeBa for the Magellanic Clouds. This correlates with earlier research which compared BPASS models for GW sources in the Galactic disk with BSE models and found a similarly sized discrepancy. We analyse and explain this discrepancy as being caused by differences between the stellar evolution codes, particularly in the treatment of mass transfer and common-envelope events in binaries, where in BPASS mass transfer is more likely to be stable and tends to lead to less orbital shrinkage in the common-envelope phase than in other codes. This difference results in fewer compact binaries with periods short enough to be detected by LISA existing in the BPASS population. For globular clusters, we conclude that the impact of dynamical effects is uncertain from the literature, but the differences in stellar evolution have an effect of a factor of a few tens.