1–5 Jul 2019
Geological Museum
Europe/Copenhagen timezone

Constraining Galactic structure with the LISA white dwarf foreground

2 Jul 2019, 15:00
20m
Main Auditorium (Geological Museum)

Main Auditorium

Geological Museum

Øster Voldgade 5-7 DK-1350 Copenhagen

Speaker

Dr Katelyn Breivik (CITA)

Description

White dwarfs (WDs) comprise $95\%$ of all stellar remnants and are thus a unique probe of the ancient structure of the Milky Way. Current and planned telescopes aren't able to directly probe the entire population due to its inherently low luminosity. However, the Galactic population of double WD binaries gives rise to a strong millihertz gravitational-wave foreground detectable by LISA. Here we show how characterizing this foreground will enable us to probe the Galactic structure in a novel way and measure the scale height of the Galaxy. We do this using a binary population synthesis study that incorporates age and metallicity-dependent Galactic spatial distributions of the double WDs.

Primary authors

Dr Katelyn Breivik (CITA) Dr Shane L. Larson (CIERA - Northwestern University) Dr Chiara M. F. Mingarelli (Flatiron Institute)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.