Talk abstract details

In the dense central regions of globular clusters close encounters of two white dwarfs are relatively frequent (one or more strong encounters per star in the lifetime of the cluster). Such encounters should be potential sources of gravitational wave emission. Thus, it is foreseeable that these collisions could be either detected by LISA or they could contribute significantly to the background noise.

We compute the gravitational wave pattern resulting from these encounters for a broad range of system parameters, like the masses and the relative distances of the white dwarfs involved in the encounter. Using these results we estimate the mean gravitational wave emission of Galactic globular clusters and we assess the fraction of such clusters that LISA could eventually detect.