Homepage of Ashley J. Ruiter

Current Position: Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden St., MS 70 Cambridge, MA 02138 USA 1 (617) 495-7201 aruiter [at] cfa.harvard.edu

Home Institution: Graduate Student Department of Astronomy New Mexico State University 1320 Frenger Mall Las Cruces, NM 88003 USA Advisor: K. Belczynski

   Research:   Also, please go here to my NMSU page.

My collaborators and I have recently calculated the LISA gravitational wave signal of the Milky Way arising from double white dwarfs. We have investigated the impact of the Galactic bulge (B) and disc (D) binaries for both detached (D) and mass-transferring (RLOF; R) binaries (see figure bottom panel below).

We find that the addition of the RLOF systems increases the frequency at which individual binaries start to become resolvable. Figure top panel: Orange and Pink lines are the estimated double white dwarf foreground noise of Hils & Bender (2000) and Nelemans et al. (2004), respectively. Grey lines represent the raw LISA data stream for the entire Galactic population of double white dwarfs from our study; the white line represents the median of this signal over 1000 resolvable frequency bins. This work has been submitted to ApJ and appears in arXiv:0705.3272v2 (see Publications link).