Dirty waveforms: multiband harmonic content of gas-embedded gravitational wave sources

Understand

We analyse the effect of stochastic torque fluctuations on the orbital evolution and the gravitational wave (GW)emission of gas-embedded sources with intermediate and extreme mass ratios.

• We show that gas-driven fluctuations imprint additional harmonic content in the GWs of the binary system, which we dub dirty waveforms(DWs).
• We find three interesting observational prospects for DWs, provided that torque fluctuations do indeed persist beyond the resolution limit of current hydrodynamical simulations.
• Firstly, DWs can produce a significant stochastic GW background, comparable to other GW noise sources.