Gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries with magnetic dipole moments

Abstract

We investigate the effects of the magnetic dipole-dipole coupling and the electromagnetic radiation on the frequency evolution of gravitational waves from inspiralling binary neutron stars with magnetic dipole moments. This study is motivated by the discovery of the superstrongly magnetized neutron stars, i.e., magnetar. We derive the contributions of the magnetic fields to the accumulated cycles in gravitational waves as $N_{mag} \sim 6 \times 10^{-3} (H/10^{16}{\rm G})^{2}$, where $H$ denotes the strength of the polar magnetic fields of each neutron star in the binary system. It is found that the effects of the magnetic fields will be negligible for the detection and the parameter estimation of gravitational waves, if the upper limit for magnetic fields of neutron stars are less than $\sim 10^{16}$G, which is the maximum magnetic field observed in the soft gamma repeaters and the anomalous X-ray pulsars up to date. We also discuss the implications of electromagnetic radiation from the inspiralling binary neutron stars for the precursory X-ray emission prior to the gamma ray burst observed by the Ginga satellite.