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Register a new userListening to the gravitational wave sound of circumbinary exoplanets
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To date more than 3500 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting a large variety of stars. Due to the sensitivity limits of the currently used detection techniques, these planets populate zones restricted either to the solar neighbourhood or towards the Galactic bulge. This selection problem prevents us from unveiling the true Galactic planetary population and is not set to change for the next two decades. Here we present a new detection method that overcomes this issue and that will allow us to detect gas giant exoplanets using gravitational wave astronomy. We show that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission can characterise hundreds of new circumbinary exoplanets orbiting white dwarf binaries everywhere in our Galaxy - a population of exoplanets so far completely unprobed - as well as detecting extragalactic bound exoplanets in the Magellanic Clouds. Such a method is not limited by stellar activity and, in extremely favourable cases, will allow LISA to detect super-Earths down to 10 Earth masses.
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The gravitational field of the sun will focus light from a distant source to a focal point at a minimal distance of 550 Astronomical Units from the sun. A proposed mission to this gravitational focus could use the sun as a very large lens, allowing (in principle) a large amplification of signal from the target, and a very high magnification. This article discusses some of the difficulties involved in using the sun as such a gravitational telescope for a candidate mission, that of imaging the surface of a previously-detected exoplanet. These difficulties include the pointing and focal length, and associated high magnification; the signal to noise ratio associated with the solar corona, and the focal blur. In addition, a method to calculate the signal gain and magnification is derived using the first-order deflection calculation and classical optics, showing that the gain is finite for an on-axis source of non-zero area.
We explore the prospects for the detection of giant circumbinary exoplanets and brown dwarfs (BDs) orbiting Galactic double white dwarfs binaries (DWDs) with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). By assuming an occurrence rate of 50%, motivated by white dwarf pollution observations, we built a Galactic synthetic population of P-type giant exoplanets and BDs orbiting DWDs. We carried this out by injecting different sub-stellar populations, with various mass and orbital separation characteristics, into the DWD population used in the LISA mission proposal. We then performed a Fisher matrix analysis to measure how many of these three-body systems show a periodic Doppler-shifted gravitational wave perturbation detectable by LISA. We report the number of circumbinary planets (CBPs) and (BDs) that can be detected by LISA for various combinations of mass and semi-major axis distributions. We identify pessimistic and optimistic scenarios corresponding, respectively, to 3 and 83 (14 and 2218) detections of CBPs (BDs), observed during the length of the nominal LISA mission. These detections are distributed all over the Galaxy following the underlying DWD distribution, and they are biased towards DWDs with higher LISA signal-to-noise ratio and shorter orbital period. Finally, we show that if LISA were to be extended for four more years, the number of systems detected will be more than doubled in both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. Our results present promising prospects for the detection of post-main sequence exoplanets and BDs, showing that gravitational waves can prove the existence of these populations over the totality of the Milky Way. Detections by LISA will deepen our knowledge on the life of exoplanets subsequent to the most extreme evolution phases of their hosts, clarifying whether new phases of planetary formation take place later in the life of the stars.
We investigate the possibility of detecting planetary or stellar companions orbiting white dwarf binaries using the LISA gravitational radiation detector. Specifically, we consider the acceleration of the barycenter of the white dwarf binary due to the orbiting third body as well as the effect of changes in the tidal field across the binary due to the perturbers eccentric orbit. We find that the movement of the barycenter is detectable for both stellar and planetary mass objects. If circumbinary planets occur with frequencies similar to gas giant planets around isolated main sequence stars, then we expect to find of order 10 such planets in four years of LISA observations. For a longer, ten-year mission the accessible parameter space for planetary mass, orbital period, and binary orbital period grows and LISAs associated yield increases to ~100 expected detections.
Gravitational waves (GWs) produced by sound waves in the primordial plasma during a strong first-order phase transition in the early Universe are going to be a main target of the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) experiment. In this short note, I draw a global picture of LISAs expected sensitivity to this type of GW signal, based on the concept of peak-integrated sensitivity curves (PISCs) recently introduced in [1909.11356, 2002.04615]. In particular, I use LISAs PISC to perform a systematic comparison of several thousands of benchmark points in ten different particle physics models in a compact fashion. The presented analysis (i) retains the complete information on the optimal signal-to-noise ratio, (ii) allows for different power-law indices describing the spectral shape of the signal, (iii) accounts for galactic confusion noise from compact binaries, and (iv) exhibits the dependence of the expected sensitivity on the collected amount of data. An important outcome of this analysis is that, for the considered set of models, galactic confusion noise typically reduces the number of observable scenarios by roughly a factor two, more or less independent of the observing time. The numerical results presented in this paper are also available on Zenodo [http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3837877].
An ensemble of inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries should produce a stochastic background of very low frequency gravitational waves. This stochastic background is predicted to be a power law, with a spectral index of -2/3, and it should be detectable by a network of precisely timed millisecond pulsars, widely distributed on the sky. This paper reports a new time slicing analysis of the 11-year data release from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) using 34 millisecond pulsars. Methods to flag potential false positive signatures are developed, including techniques to identify responsible pulsars. Mitigation strategies are then presented. We demonstrate how an incorrect noise model can lead to spurious signals, and show how independently modeling noise across 30 Fourier components, spanning NANOGravs frequency range, effectively diagnoses and absorbs the excess power in gravitational-wave searches. This results in a nominal, and expected, progression of our gravitational-wave statistics. Additionally we show that the first interstellar medium event in PSR J1713+0747 pollutes the common red noise process with low-spectral index noise, and use a tailored noise model to remove these effects.
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