Galactic binary science with the new LISA design
Abstract
Building on the great success of the LISA Pathfinder mission, the outlines of a new LISA mission design were laid out at the 11th International LISA Symposium in Zurich. The revised design calls for three identical spacecraft forming an equilateral triangle with 2.5 million kilometer sides, and two laser links per side delivering full polarization sensitivity. With the demonstrated Pathfinder performance for the disturbance reduction system, and a well studied design for the laser metrology, it is anticipated that the new mission will have a sensitivity very close to the original LISA design. This implies that the mid-band performance, between 0.5 mHz and 3 mHz, will be limited by unresolved signals from compact binaries in our galaxy. Here we use the new LISA design to compute updated estimates for the galactic confusion noise, the number of resolvable galactic binaries, and the accuracy to which key parameters of these systems can be measured.
- Publication:
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Journal of Physics Conference Series
- Pub Date:
- May 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1088/1742-6596/840/1/012024
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1703.09858
- Bibcode:
- 2017JPhCS.840a2024C
- Keywords:
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- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
- E-Print:
- 4 pages, 5 figures. Prepared for the proceedings of the 11th International LISA Symposium. Typo corrected in Equation (1). Thanks to Latham Boyle for catching this