No Arabic abstract
We use the most recent, complete and independent measurements of masses and radii of white dwarfs in binaries to bound the class of non-trivial modified gravity theories, viable after GW170817/GRB170817, using its effect on the mass-radius relation of the stars. We show that the uncertainty in the latest data is sufficiently small that residual evolutionary effects, most notably the effect of core composition, finite temperature and envelope structure, must now accounted for if correct conclusions about the nature of gravity are to be made. We model corrections resulting from finite temperature and envelopes to a base Hamada-Salpeter cold equation of state and derive consistent bounds on the possible modifications of gravity in the stars interiors, finding that $Y< 0.14$ at 95% confidence, an improvement of a factor of three with respect to previous bounds. Finally, our analysis reveals some fundamental degeneracies between the theory of gravity and the precise chemical makeup of white dwarfs.
Recent evidence of super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs (WDs), from the observations of over-luminous type Ia supernovae (SNeIa), has been a great astrophysical discovery. However, no such massive WDs have so far been observed directly as their luminosities are generally quite low. Hence it immediately raises the question of whether there is any possibility of detecting them directly. The search for super-Chandrasekhar WDs is very important as SNeIa are used as standard candles in cosmology. In this article, we show that continuous gravitational wave can allow us to detect such super-Chandrasekhar WDs directly.
In about last couple of decades, the inference of the violation of the Chandrasekhar mass-limit of white dwarfs from indirect observation is probably a revolutionary discovery in astronomy. Various researchers have already proposed different theories to explain this interesting phenomenon. However, such massive white dwarfs usually possess very little luminosity, and hence they, so far, cannot be detected directly by any observations. We have already proposed that the continuous gravitational wave may be one of the probes to detect them directly, and in the future, various space-based detectors such as LISA, DECIGO, and BBO, should be able to detect many of those white dwarfs (provided they behave like pulsars). In this paper, we address various timescales related to the emission of gravitational as well as dipole radiations. This exploration sets a timescale for the detectors to observe the massive white dwarfs.
After the prediction of many sub- and super-Chandrasekhar (at least a dozen for the latter) limiting mass white dwarfs, hence apparently peculiar class of white dwarfs, from the observations of luminosity of type Ia supernovae, researchers have proposed various models to explain these two classes of white dwarfs separately. We earlier showed that these two peculiar classes of white dwarfs, along with the regular white dwarfs, can be explained by a single form of the f(R) gravity, whose effect is significant only in the high-density regime, and it almost vanishes in the low-density regime. However, since there is no direct detection of such white dwarfs, it is difficult to single out one specific theory from the zoo of modified theories of gravity. We discuss the possibility of direct detection of such white dwarfs in gravitational wave astronomy. It is well-known that in f(R) gravity, more than two polarization modes are present. We estimate the amplitudes of all the relevant modes for the peculiar as well as the regular white dwarfs. We further discuss the possibility of their detections through future-based gravitational wave detectors, such as LISA, ALIA, DECIGO, BBO, or Einstein Telescope, and thereby put constraints or rule out various modified theories of gravity. This exploration links the theory with possible observations through gravitational wave in f(R) gravity.
Recent detection of gravitational wave from nine black hole merger events and one neutron star merger event by LIGO and VIRGO shed a new light in the field of astrophysics. On the other hand, in the past decade, a few super-Chandrasekhar white dwarf candidates have been inferred through the peak luminosity of the light-curves of a few peculiar type Ia supernovae, though there is no direct detection of these objects so far. Similarly, a number of neutron stars with mass $>2M_odot$ have also been observed. Continuous gravitational wave can be one of the alternate ways to detect these compact objects directly. It was already argued that magnetic field is one of the prominent physics to form super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs and massive neutron stars. If such compact objects are rotating with certain angular frequency, then they can efficiently emit gravitational radiation, provided their magnetic field and rotation axes are not aligned, and these gravitational waves can be detected by some of the upcoming detectors, e.g. LISA, BBO, DECIGO, Einstein Telescope etc. This will certainly be a direct detection of rotating magnetized white dwarfs as well as massive neutron stars.
We report on a search for differential shifts between electronic and vibronic transitions in carbon-rich white dwarfs BPM 27606 and Procyon B. The absence of differential shifts within the spectral resolution and taking into account systematic effects such as space motion and pressure shifts allows us to set the first upper bound of astrophysical origin on the coupling between the Higgs field and the Kreschmann curvature invariant. Our analysis provides the basis for a more general methodology to derive bounds to the coupling of long-range scalar fields to curvature invariants in an astrophysical setting complementary to the ones available from high-energy physics or table-top experiments.