A Multimessenger Strategy for Downselecting the Orientations of Galactic Close White Dwarf Binaries

TL;DR

This paper proposes a multimessenger approach combining gravitational wave data from LISA with electromagnetic observations to better determine the orientations of close white dwarf binaries, reducing degeneracy in their orbital alignment measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate electromagnetic timing data to break degeneracies in gravitational wave-based orientation measurements of white dwarf binaries.

Findings

Electromagnetic timing data reduces degeneracy from fourfold to twofold.

Combining GW and EM data improves accuracy of binary orientation measurements.

Method enhances the scientific return of LISA observations.

Abstract

The planned space-based gravitational wave detector, LISA, will provide a fundamentally new means of studying the orbital alignment of close white dwarf binaries. However, due to the inherent symmetry of their gravitational wave signals, a fourfold degeneracy arises in the transverse projections of their angular momentum vectors. In this paper, we demonstrate that by incorporating timing information from electromagnetic observations, such as radial velocity modulations and light curves, this degeneracy can be reduced to twofold.