Degeneracy between mass and peculiar acceleration for the double white dwarfs in the LISA band

Abstract

Mass and distance are fundamental quantities to measure in gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy. However, recent studies suggest that the measurement may be biased due to the acceleration of GW source. Here we develop an analytical method to quantify such a bias induced by a tertiary on a double white dwarf (DWD), since DWDs are the most common GW sources in the milli-Hertz band. We show that in a large parameter space the mass is degenerate with the peculiar acceleration, so that from the waveform we can only retrieve a mass of $\mathcal{M}(1+\Gamma {)}^{3/5}$, where $\mathcal{M}$ is the real chirp mass of the DWD and $\Gamma$ is a dimensionless factor proportional to the peculiar acceleration. Based on our analytical method, we conduct mock observation of DWDs by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). We find that in about $9\%$ of the cases the measured chirp mass is biased due to the presence of a tertiary by $(5-30)\%$. Even more extreme cases are found in about a dozen DWDs and they may be misclassified as double neutron stars, binary black holes, DWDs undergoing mass transfer, or even binaries containing lower-mass-gap objects and primordial black holes. The bias in mass also affects the measurement of distance, resulting in a seemingly over-density of DWDs within a heliocentric distance of $1$ kpc as well as beyond $100$ kpc. Our result highlights the necessity of modeling the astrophysical environments of GW sources to retrieve their correct physical parameters.

References in corpus (54)

• Monitoring stellar orbits around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• Gravitational Waves from Mergin Compact Binaries: How Accurately Can One Extract the Binary's Parameters from the Inspiral Waveform?
• Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves
• The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications
• The Black Hole Mass Distribution in the Galaxy
• Detection, Measurement and Gravitational Radiation
• Gaia Data Release 2: Catalogue validation
• The Mass Distribution of Stellar-Mass Black Holes
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. I: Supermassive black hole binaries
• The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems
• The gravitational wave signal from the Galactic disk population of binaries containing two compact objects
• Gaia Data Release 1: Catalogue validation
• Model Waveform Accuracy Standards for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis
• Contact Binaries with Additional Components.I. The Extant Data
• Short-period AM CVn systems as optical, X-ray and gravitational wave sources
• Constructing Gravitational Waves from Generic Spin-Precessing Compact Binary Inspirals
• The binarity of the local white dwarf population
• Predicting the LISA white dwarf binary population in the Milky Way with cosmological simulations
• Science with the TianQin Observatory: Preliminary results on Galactic double white dwarf binaries
• Population synthesis of triple systems in the context of mergers of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs
• What if LIGO's gravitational wave detections are strongly lensed by massive galaxy clusters?
• Detecting triple systems with gravitational wave observations
• Probing stellar binary black hole formation in galactic nuclei via the imprint of their center of mass acceleration on their gravitational wave signal
• Parameter estimation for Galactic binaries by LISA
• The Fate of Binaries in the Galactic Center: The Mundane and the Exotic
• The Effect of Massive Perturbers on Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspiral Waveforms
• The rate of WD-WD head-on collisions in isolated triples is too low to explain standard type Ia supernovae
• On the Formation of Double White Dwarfs through Stable Mass Transfer and a Common Envelope
• Massive binaries in the vicinity of Sgr A*
• The effect of matter structure on the gravitational waveform
• Accreting Double white dwarf binaries: Implications for LISA
• A multi-messenger study of the Milky Way's stellar disc and bulge with LISA, Gaia and LSST
• Detecting hierarchical stellar systems with LISA
• The peculiar acceleration of stellar-origin black hole binaries: measurement and biases with LISA
• Mass-redshift Degeneracy for Gravitational-wave Sources in the Vicinity of a Supermassive Black Hole
• Binary radial velocity measurements with space-based gravitational-wave detectors
• Astrophysical Model Selection in Gravitational Wave Astronomy
• Gravitational-wave detection and parameter estimation for accreting black-hole binaries and their electromagnetic counterpart
• A Direct Probe of Mass Density Near Inspiraling Binary Black Holes
• Listening to the gravitational wave sound of circumbinary exoplanets
• Long Term Operation of LISA and Galactic Close White Dwarf Binaries
• Gravitational Waves from Hierarchical Triple Systems with Kozai-Lidov Oscillation
• Detecting Kozai-Lidov imprints on the gravitational waves of intermediate-mass black holes in galactic nuclei
• Reinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Holes at Cosmological Distances
• Detecting Planets around Compact Binaries with Gravitational Wave Detectors in Space
• Discovery of the first resolved triple white dwarf
• Fake massive black holes in the milli-Hertz gravitational-wave band
• Most EL CVn systems are inner binaries of hierarchical triples
• Towards Multiple-Star Population Synthesis
• Limits on a population of collisional-triples as progenitors of Type-Ia supernovae
• Retrieving the True Masses of Gravitational-wave Sources
• Can LISA Resolve Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud?

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Detecting Accelerating Eccentric Binaries in the LISA Band
• Hunting intermediate-mass black holes with LISA binary radial velocity measurements
• Calculating the Gravitational Waves Emitted from High-speed Sources
• LISA double white dwarf binaries as Galactic accelerometers
• Tracking the Long-Term GW Phase Evolution for HM Cancri-like Binaries with LISA
• Potential Tertiary Effects on the LISA Verification Binary HM Cancri
• Perturbative Frequency Expansion for Nearly Monochromatic Binary Black Holes Detectable with LISA