Opportunistic Search for Continuous Gravitational Waves from Compact Objects in Long-period Binaries

Abstract

Abstract Most all-sky searches for continuous gravitational waves assume the source to be isolated. In this paper, we allow for an unknown companion object in a long-period orbit and opportunistically use previous results from an all-sky search for isolated sources to constrain the continuous gravitational-wave amplitude over a large and unexplored range of binary orbital parameters without explicitly performing a dedicated search for binary systems. The resulting limits are significantly more constraining than any existing upper limits for unknown binary systems, albeit the latter apply to different orbital parameter ranges that are computationally much costlier to explore.