2020/05/31 by Shun-Jia Huang, S. Huang, Yi-Ming Hu +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Biology #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Observatory #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #White (mutation) #White dwarf #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.102.063021
published as Phys. Rev. D 102, 063021 (2020) · 21 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 5 appendices, to be published in Phys. Rev. D
openalex publication_date 2020/09/21 · arxiv created 2020/09/24 · arxiv updated 2020/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We explore the prospects of detecting Galactic double white dwarf (DWD) binaries with the space-based gravitational wave (GW) observatory TianQin. In this work, we analyze both a sample of currently known DWDs and a realistic synthetic population of DWDs to assess the number of guaranteed detections and the full capacity of the mission. We find that TianQin can detect 12 out of \ensuremath∼100 known DWDs; GW signals of these binaries can be modeled in detail ahead of the mission launch, and therefore they can be used as verification sources. Besides, we estimate that TianQin has a potential to detect as many as 104 DWDs in the Milky Way. TianQin is expected to measure their orbital periods and amplitudes with accuracies of \ensuremath∼10^\ensuremath-7 and \ensuremath∼0.2, respectively, and to localize on the sky a large fraction (39%) of the detected population to better than 1 deg2. We conclude that TianQin has the potential to significantly advance our knowledge on Galactic DWDs by increasing the sample up to 2 orders of magnitude, and will allow their multimessenger studies in combination with electromagnetic telescopes. We also test the possibilities of different configurations of TianQin: (1) the same mission with a different orientation, (2) two perpendicular constellations combined into a network, and (3) the combination of the network with the ESA-led Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. We find that the network of detectors boosts the accuracy on the measurement of source parameters by 1--2 orders of magnitude, with the improvement on sky localization being the most significant.