LISA will see a gazillion white dwarfs, but we won’t, or at least not individually. Those signals will actually pile up together in a mashed potato thing called foreground. But this mashed potato won’t be smooth (translate: the gravitational-wave signal won’t be stationary and Gaussian) and this structure can indeed be precious for extracting more information from LISA. But first, let’s taste this with today’s paper, i.e. characterize the foreground.

Riccardo Buscicchio, Antoine Klein, Valeriya Korol, Francesco Di Renzo, Christopher J. Moore, Davide Gerosa, Alessandro Carzaniga.
arXiv:2410.08263 [astro-ph.HE].

ps. This started as the student project of Alessandro Carzaniga, great it’s finally out!