The Angular Resolution of Space-Based Gravitational Wave Detectors

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the angular resolution of proposed space-based gravitational wave detectors with different satellite configurations, emphasizing the importance of higher-order PN waveform terms for accurate predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of the angular resolution for two detector configurations and highlights the significance of including higher-order PN terms in waveform modeling.

Findings

Higher-order PN terms significantly affect angular resolution predictions.

Precessing-plane detectors show different resolution characteristics than ecliptic-plane detectors.

New effects in angular resolution are identified that were not previously reported.

Abstract

Proposed space-based gravitational wave antennas involve satellites arrayed either in an equilateral triangle around the earth in the ecliptic plane (the ecliptic-plane option) or in an equilateral triangle orbiting the sun in such a way that the plane of the triangle is tilted at 60 degrees relative to the ecliptic (the precessing-plane option). In this paper, we explore the angular resolution of these two classes of detectors for two kinds of sources (essentially monochromatic compact binaries and coalescing massive-black-hole binaries) using time-domain expressions for the gravitational waveform that are accurate to 4/2 PN order. Our results display an interesting effect not previously reported in the literature, and underline the importance of including the higher-order PN terms in the waveform when predicting the angular resolution of ecliptic-plane detector arrays.