Searching for continuous gravitational waves from highly deformed compact objects with DECIGO

Abstract

Searches for continuous gravitational waves from isolated compact objects and those in binary systems aim to detect nonaxisymmetric, deformed neutron stars at particular locations in the Galaxy or all sky. However, a large fraction of known pulsars have rotational frequencies that lie outside the audio frequency band, rendering current detectors insensitive to these pulsars. In this work, we show that DECIGO, a future space-based decihertz gravitational-wave interferometer, will be sensitive to severely deformed compact objects, e.g., hybrid stars, neutron stars, or magnetars. We estimate the number of possible compact objects that could be detected with such high deformations, both via their individual continuous gravitational-wave emission and the stochastic gravitational-wave background created by a superposition of gravitational waves from the ∼108 compact objects in the Galaxy. Furthermore, we show that the existence of such compact objects could be probed across a wide parameter space at a fraction of the computational cost of current searches for isolated compact objects and those in binary systems. For known pulsars, we will be able to both beat the spin-down limit and probe the Brans-Dicke modified theory of gravity parameter ζ < 1 for approximately 85% of known pulsars with fgw < 10 Hz, the latter of which is currently only possible for O(10) pulsars. DECIGO will thus open a new window to probe highly deformed compact objects and over half of the known pulsars.