Gravitational waves from double white dwarfs as probes of the milky way

Abstract

ABSTRACT Future gravitational wave detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), will be able to resolve a significant number of the ultra compact stellar-mass binaries in our own Galaxy and its neighbourhood. These will be mostly double white dwarf (DWD) binaries, and their underlying population characteristics can be directly correlated to the different properties of the Galaxy. In particular with LISA, we will be able to resolve ${\sim}\mathcal {O}(10^4)$ binaries, while the rest will generate a confusion foreground signal. Analogously to how the total electromagnetic radiation emitted by a galaxy can be related to the underlying total stellar mass, in this work, we propose a framework to infer the same quantity by investigating the spectral shape and amplitude of the confusion foreground signal. For a fixed DWD evolution model and thus a fixed binary fraction, we retrieve percentage-level relative errors on the total stellar mass, which improves for increasing values of the mass. At the same time, we find that variations in the Milky Way shape at a fixed mass and at scale heights smaller than 500 pc are not distinguishable based on the shape of stochastic signal alone. We perform this analysis on simulations of the LISA data, estimating the resolvable sources based on signal-to-noise criteria. Finally, we utilize the catalogue of resolvable sources to probe the characteristics of the underlying population of DWD binaries. We show that the DWD frequency, coalescence time and chirp mass (up to <0.7 M⊙) distributions can be reconstructed from LISA data with no bias.