Extracting Astrophysical Information of Highly-Eccentric Binaries in the Millihertz Gravitational Wave Band
Authors: Zeyuan Xuan, Smadar Naoz, Alvin K. Y. Li, Bence Kocsis, Erik Petigura, Alan M. Knee, Jess McIver, Kyle Kremer, Will M. Farr
Abstract: Wide, highly eccentric ($e>0.9$) compact binaries can naturally arise as progenitors of gravitational wave (GW) mergers. These systems are expected to have a significant population in the mHz band, with their GW signals characterized by ``repeated bursts" emitted upon each pericenter passage. In this study, we show that the detection of mHz GW signals from highly eccentric stellar mass binaries in the local universe can strongly constrain their orbital parameters. Specifically, it can achieve a relative measurement error of $\sim 10^{-6}$ for orbital frequency and $\sim 1\%$ for eccentricity (as $1-e$) in most of the detectable cases. On the other hand, the binary's mass ratio, distance, and intrinsic orbital inclination may be less precisely determined due to degeneracies in the GW waveform. We also perform mock LISA data analysis to evaluate the realistic detectability of highly eccentric compact binaries. Our results show that highly eccentric systems could be efficiently identified when multiple GW sources and stationary Gaussian instrumental noise are present in the detector output. This work highlights the potential of extracting the signal of ``bursting'' LISA sources to provide valuable insights into their orbital evolution, surrounding environment, and formation channels.
Explore the paper tree
Click on the tree nodes to be redirected to a given paper and access their summaries and virtual assistant
Look for similar papers (in beta version)
By clicking on the button above, our algorithm will scan all papers in our database to find the closest based on the contents of the full papers and not just on metadata. Please note that it only works for papers that we have generated summaries for and you can rerun it from time to time to get a more accurate result while our database grows.