Astronomy Tea Talk

The Galactic population of double stellar remnants will be the largest source class, by number, for LISA as well as the largest noise source for the mission at frequencies below 1 mHz. Double white dwarf binaries make up the vast majority of the population and are flagship multimessenger sources, observable both with electromagnetic (EM) surveys and gravitational waves (GWs). More massive stellar remnants, like neutron stars and black holes, will be observable as extra-Galactic sources and will be largely complementary to sources observable by ground-based GW detectors. In the years preceding LISA's launch, EM surveys which continue to discover stellar-remnant binaries and their progenitors, combined with theoretical modeling of the formation pathways which produce them, will pave the way to a fully realized multi-messenger, multi-band catalog in the 2030s. While the size of the multi-messenger population is expected to contain less than 10% of the total population of sources resolved by LISA, GW and EM observations, used together, will provide a unique laboratory to study the formation and evolution of stellar remnant binaries and their progenitors. In this talk, I will give an overview of a selection of science cases that will be made possible by combining LISA's GW observations with EM observations from legacy survey data and follow-up observations. I will also discuss prospects for constraining the formation and evolution of binary stellar remnants in the lead up to LISA's launch.