Publishing house / Banach Center Publications / All volumes

Abstract

Neutron stars may emit steady gravitational wave signals that will be among the first kinds of gravitational wave signals that the new generation of interferometric detectors will search for. I consider here the possibility that accreting neutron stars may be driven into the steady emission of gravitational waves. I estimate the amplitudes that the waves may have if the accretion takes place at the Eddington limit, such as may happen when a neutron star spirals inside a giant star in the endphase of binary evolution. I consider the computational difficulties of conducting a search for such radiation from known target stars, allowing for the fact that the orbit will not be known from other observations. It seems possible that, with supercomputers, very sensitive searches of a handful of targets may be possible.