Galactic Binaries as Sources of Gravitational Waves

Abstract

I review the expected Galactic sources of gravitational waves, concentrating on the low-frequency domain and summarise the current observational and theoretical knowledge we have. A model for the Galactic population of close binaries, which is tested against the observations is used to predict the expected signal for the future space based gravitational wave detector LISA. With a simple model for the electro-magnetic emission from the same binaries I argue that a fair number of the LISA systems have electro-magnetic counterparts, which can be used to improve in particular the distance and mass measurements of these systems by LISA. Furthermore, LISA will enable us to test some aspects of the theory of binary evolution that are very difficult to asses in different ways.