2023-09-22 18:05:27
Gravitational wave detectors on Earth like Ligo and Virgo — or like the one expected to fly into space by the 2030s, the Lisa (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a mission which will be led by Esa in collaboration with NASA —, are interferometers. They do not work directly like telescopes or regular glasses with mirrors and lenses.
However, it is theoretically possible to process the signals recorded by these instruments to obtain images, certainly raw, a bit like those obtained in space with telescopes observing in the gamma ray region using yet another technique. , and which must show images in the form of light spots, although it is not a question of electromagnetic waves but of light waves.
Tens of millions of UCBs seen by Lisa
As shown in a publication in The Astronomical Journal a team of researchers has therefore managed to simulate a synthetic image that could be expected by processing Lisa’s observations and which would show in a panoramic view the sources of gravitational waves in the Milky Way in the form of binary systems composed ONLY of stars compact, that is to say the choice of combinations of stellar black holes, neutron stars or even white dwarfs. They are called in English ultracompact binaries (UCBs) and their orbital periods are less than one hour.
These sources would not be about to collide in the near future and they would therefore still be a little far from each other, but not that much, which in this case means that we would detect gravitational waves in the millihertz range (10−3 hertz). Tens of millions of UCBs are expected to exist in the Galaxy.
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