Binary White Dwarfs as Laboratories for Extreme Gravity with LISA

Understand

The observation of low-frequency gravitational waves with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna will allow the study of new sources of gravitational radiation that are not accessible by ground-based instruments.

• Gravitational wave sources provide invaluable information both about their astrophysics, as well as the nature of the gravitational interaction in their neighborhoods.
• One low frequency source that has not received much attention regarding the latter are galactic binaries composed of two white dwarves or a white dwarf and a neutron star.
• We here show that, contrary to the common lore, such gravitational wave sources can indeed be used to constrain an important feature of the gravitational interaction: the absence of pre-Newtonian, dipolar dissipation.