Manuel Pichardo Marcano (Fisk/Vanderbilt)

Karan Jani (Vanderbilt)

Detection of the most massive white dwarf mergers with LILA

Double WD Binaries

Caltech/NASA

• Gravitational Wave Sources
• WDs  with masses 1.3 to 1.4 M_⊙
• Detached
• Circular Orbit
• P_orb
  • 15 seconds to merge
• f_grav = 2 x f_orb

Type Ia Supernova

• Type Ia
• Chandrasekhar Mass (M_ch = 1.4M_⊙)
• Cosmological standard candles
  • Hubble Tension
•  Heavy-element factories

R. Sankrit and W. Blair (JHU) et al., ESA, NASA

Accretion-induced Collapse

• Formation of Neutron Stars (e.g. Nomoto et al. 1979)
• Important in GCs (Grindlay et al. 1988)
• Predicted EM:
  • Gamma Rays (e.g. Dar et al. 1992)
  • Radio (e.g. Piro et al. 2013)
  • Optical (Sousa et al. 2023)

NASA, ESA, and J. Anderson (STScI)

Lunar Gravitational Wave Observatories

• The Lunar Gravitational-wave Antenna (LGWA) (Parameswaran et al. 2024)
  • Seismometer
• Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA):
  • LIGO-like suspension system

Methods

• Evolve WDs  with masses 1.3 to 1.4 M⊙
• 4 years before merging:
  • Roche-lobe: Lower Mass Fills Roche Lobe
  • Contact: a = R1+R2
• Calculate SNR for LGWA and Gravitational-Wave Lunar Observatory for Cosmology (GLOC) as a LILA proxy

Wagg et al. (2022)

Dupletsa et al. (2023)

Strain

Horizon Distance

Horizon Distance

Early Alert at 10 Mpc

Early Alert at 10 Mpc

GWs from the Moon

• GW freq. between LISA and LIGO
• Massive WDs merger at Mpc distances
  • Weeks of Early Alert
  • Multi-Messenger Astrophysics
• WDs + NS
• WDs + Primordial BHs