Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter TimeDomain

Wednesday, 15 September 2021, 16:41   (virtual TimeD)

Gaia meets LISA: Updated predictions for LISA verification binaries using Gaia EDR3

Thomas Kupfer
Texas Tech University

The most compact binary stars have physical separations between components smaller than the Earth-Moon distance and orbital periods less than about 60min. They are sources of low-frequency gravitational waves as will be probed by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Although the known sample is still in-homogenous, ongoing and upcoming large scale sky surveys have the potential to discover and study them with well understood biases and selection effects. This opens the door for multi-messenger studies for hundreds of ultracompact Galactic binaries. With the data release of Gaia DR2 we were able to derive, for the first time, realistic strain, SNR predictions for the known LISA verification binaries. The most recent data release EDR3 provided improved parallaxes and proper motions. In this talk I will present updated results for LISA verification binaries including the most recently discovered systems using Gaia EDR3. I will also present an overview of the ZTF high-cadence Galactic Plane survey which aims to find short LISA verification binaries at low Galactic latitudes.