Prospects for detection of detached double white dwarf binaries with Gaia, LSST and LISA

By V. Korol, E. Rossi, Paul J. Groot, G. Nelemans, S. Toonen, Anthony G. A. Brown. 2017

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Double white dwarf (DWD) binaries are expected to be very common in the Milky Way, but their intrinsic faintness challenges the detection of these systems. Currently, only a few tens of detached DWDs are know. Such systems offer the best chance of extracting the physical properties that would allow us to address a wealth of outstanding questions ranging from the nature of white dwarfs and thermonuclear supernovae, over stellar and binary evolution to mapping the Galaxy. In this paper, we explore the prospects for detections of ultra-compact (with binary separations of a few solar radii or less) detached DWDs in (1) optical radiation with Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and (2) gravitational wave radiation with Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LISA). We show that Gaia, LSST and LISA have the potential to detect, respectively, around a few hundred, a thousand and 25 thousand DWD systems. Moreover, Gaia and LSST data will extend by, respectively, a factor of 2 and 7 the guaranteed sample of LISA verification sources, binaries detectable in electromagnetic and gravitational wave radiation, opening the era of multimessenger astronomy for these sources.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7741ef7b26b89b4ecbe6aa0f1306ea28517f5e0

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Citations in the corpus

• Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “[160, 169]), μAres will greatly improve our understanding of these systems by leveraging on the individual identification of O(10(5)) DWD and on the detailed characterization of the unresolved foreground down to 10−5 Hz (see”
• COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “The features present in the ASD are often smoothed out to produce a foreground (e.g., Littenberg et al. 2013; Korol et al. 2017; Lamberts et al. 2019).”
• LISA verification binaries with updated distances from Gaia Data Release 2 (2018, methodology): “…surveys such as OmegaWhite (Macfarlane et al. 2015), ZTF (Bellm 2014), BlackGEM (Bloemen et al. 2015), GOTO (Steeghs 2017), Gaia and LSST (see Korol et al. 2017 for both) are expected to discover a more unbiased sample across both hemispheres and at low Galactic latitudes before LISA gets…”
• Predicting the LISA white dwarf binary population in the Milky Way with cosmological simulations (2019, background): “Beyond ' 5 kpc, which will be observable by LSST, He-He and He-CO DWDs largely dominate the sample.”
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( ): Convective Boundaries, Element Diffusion, and Massive Star Explosions (2017, background): “…billion pixel digital camera (LSST Science Collaboration et al. 2017) to open new perspectives on transient objects such as tidal disruption events (Bade et al. 1996; Stern et al. 2004; Arcavi et al. 2014; Komossa 2015) and interacting close binary systems (Oluseyi et al. 2012; Korol et al. 2017).”