2022MNRAS.511.6143Z

We analyse the effect of stochastic torque fluctuations on the orbital evolution and the gravitational wave (GW) emission of gas-embedded sources with intermediate and extreme mass ratios. We show that gas-driven fluctuations imprint additional harmonic content in the GWs of the binary system, which we dub dirty waveforms (DWs). We find three interesting observational prospects for DWs, provided that torque fluctuations do indeed persist beyond the resolution limit of current hydrodynamical simulations. First, DWs can produce a significant stochastic GW background, comparable to other GW noise sources. Secondly, the energy flux implied by the additional harmonics can cause a detectable secular phase shift in Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) sources, even if the net torque fluctuations vanish when averaged over orbital time-scales. Lastly, the DWs of moderate-redshift nHz supermassive binaries detectable by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) could be detectable in the mHz range, producing a new type of PTA-LISA multiband gravitational source. Our results suggest that searching for DWs and their effects can potentially be a novel way to probe the heaviest of black holes and the physics of the accretion discs surrounding them. We find these results to be a further confirmation of the many exciting prospects of actively searching for environmental effects within the data stream of future GW detectors.