NASA Scientists Show How Gravitational Waves Can Reveal New Worlds
Now two studies led by NASA astrophysicists show in new detail how LISA could reveal a new and unique population of exoplanets — worlds beyond our solar system — throughout our galaxy.
Key points
- NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Astronomers estimate that our Milky Way galaxy contains 10 million double white dwarf systems with orbital periods of less than an hour, which generate gravitational waves in the right range for LISA to find.
- “Something similar occurs with gravitational waves,” said Scott Noble, a theoretical astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and a coauthor on the confirmation paper.
- As a collaborative partner, NASA is contributing the telescopes, other critical hardware, and engineering and scientific support as part of its mission to better understand how the universe works.
Additional details
- The second paper, by McGrath and coauthors, investigates how such planets could be confirmed using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
- Watch to learn how the presence of a planet modifies the gravitational wave signal from tightly orbiting white dwarfs.
- “If an exoplanet also orbits within one of these systems, its presence becomes imprinted on the gravitational wave signal in a way we’ll be able to uncover.” Two papers published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal detail the findings.
- Add a sufficiently massive planet to the system, and its presence causes the binary to experience reflex motion, adding a Doppler modulation to the gravitational signal.” For LISA, this modulation will appear as sidebands, secondary signals at both higher and lower frequencies than the primary one.
- “By themselves, double white dwarfs will emit gravitational waves at a nearly continuous frequency.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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