A test for LISA foreground Gaussianity and stationarity. I. Galactic white-dwarf binaries

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.

R. Buscicchio, A. Klein, V. Korol, F. Di Renzo, C. J. Moore, D. Gerosa, A. Carzaniga.
arXiv:2410.08263 [astro-ph.HE].