Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-27-2025

Abstract

Space-based gravitational wave detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and Taiji, will observe GWs from O(108) galactic binary systems, allowing a completely unobscured view of the Milky Way structure. While previous studies have established theoretical expectations based on idealized data-analysis methods that use the true catalog of sources, we present an end-to-end analysis pipeline for inferring galactic structure parameters based on the detector output alone. We employ the GBSIEVER algorithm to extract GB signals from LISA Data Challenge data and develop a maximum likelihood approach to estimate a bulge-disk galactic model using the resolved GBs. We introduce a two-tiered selection methodology, combining frequency derivative thresholding and proximity criteria, to address the systematic overestimation of frequency derivatives that compromises distance measurements. We quantify the performance of our pipeline in recovering key Galactic structure parameters and the potential biases introduced by neglecting the errors in estimating the parameters of individual GBs. Our methodology represents a step forward in developing practical techniques that bridge the gap between theoretical possibilities and observational implementation.

Comments

© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Universe

DOI

10.3390/universe11080248

Download

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.