Astrophysics of white dwarf binaries

Abstract

White dwarf binaries are the most common compact binaries in the Universe and are especially important for low-frequency gravitational wave detectors such as LISA. There are a number of open questions about binary evolution and the Galactic population of white dwarf binaries that can be solved using gravitational wave data and at the same time, our ever improving knowledge about these binaries will help to predict the signals that can be expected for LISA. In addition a number of white dwarf binaries will serve as verification sources for the instrument. I will discuss these issues and report recent, surprising, developments in this field. Finally I report calculations about the feasibility of complementary electro-magnetic observations which unfortunately cannot reproduce the optimistic results of Cooray et al. (2004).