Shakya Premachandra's paper on the orbital ephemeris of Cyg X-2, the next-best candidate LMXB (after Sco X-1) for continuous gravitational waves, has now been accepted by ApJ. Systems like Cyg X-2 and Sco X-1 may produce detectable gravitational radiation from "mountains" on the rapidly rotating neutron star, and precise knowledge of the system parameters (including the orbital period and neutron star spin frequency) may be critical for optimal GW searches with LIGO. However, many of the candidates are rather poorly known, so Shakya's analysis assembled the available data on the source to improve this situation. The accepted paper is available now at arXiv:1604.03233.

Labels: 2016, /gravitational waves