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Creators/Authors contains: "Pala, Anna F."

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  1. Abstract

    Galactic compact binaries with orbital periods shorter than a few hours emit detectable gravitational waves (GWs) at low frequencies. Their GW signals can be detected with the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Crucially, they may be useful in the early months of the mission operation in helping to validate LISA's performance in comparison to prelaunch expectations. We present an updated list of 55 candidate LISA-detectable binaries with measured properties, for which we derive distances based on Gaia Data Release 3 astrometry. Based on the known properties from electromagnetic observations, we predict the LISA detectability after 1, 3, 6, and 48 months using Bayesian analysis methods. We distinguish between verification and detectable binaries as being detectable after 3 and 48 months, respectively. We find 18 verification binaries and 22 detectable sources, which triples the number of known LISA binaries over the last few years. These include detached double white dwarfs, AM CVn binaries, one ultracompact X-ray binary, and two hot subdwarf binaries. We find that across this sample the GW amplitude is expected to be measured to ≈10% on average, while the inclination is expected to be determined with ≈15° precision. For detectable binaries, these average errors increase to ≈50% and ≈40°, respectively.

     
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  2. Abstract

    White dwarf photospheric parameters are usually obtained by means of spectroscopic or photometric analysis. These results are not always consistent with each other, with the published values often including just the statistical uncertainties. The differences are more dramatic for white dwarfs with helium-dominated photospheres, so to obtain realistic uncertainties we have analysed a sample of 13 of these white dwarfs, applying both techniques to up to three different spectroscopic and photometric data sets for each star. We found mean standard deviations of $\left\langle \sigma {T_{\mathrm{eff}}}\right\rangle = 524$ K, $\left\langle \sigma {\log g}\right\rangle = 0.27$ dex and $\left\langle \sigma {\log (\mathrm{H/He})}\right\rangle = 0.31$ dex for the effective temperature, surface gravity, and relative hydrogen abundance, respectively, when modelling diverse spectroscopic data. The photometric fits provided mean standard deviations up to $\left\langle \sigma {T_{\mathrm{eff}}}\right\rangle = 1210$ K and $\left\langle \sigma {\log g}\right\rangle = 0.13$ dex. We suggest these values to be adopted as realistic lower limits to the published uncertainties in parameters derived from spectroscopic and photometric fits for white dwarfs with similar characteristics. In addition, we investigate the effect of fitting the observational data adopting three different photospheric chemical compositions. In general, pure helium model spectra result in larger Teff compared to those derived from models with traces of hydrogen. The log g shows opposite trends: smaller spectroscopic values and larger photometric ones when compared to models with hydrogen. The addition of metals to the models also affects the derived atmospheric parameters, but a clear trend is not found.

     
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