- Accepted Paper
Doppler effect of the Milky Way rotation on mHz gravitational waves
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 30 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/thgv-qrks
Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 30 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/thgv-qrks
We model the stellar density and the rotation curve of the Milky Way and compute the gravitational-wave spectrum of its unresolved binaries as a function of direction. Because the Galaxy rotates, the waves emitted along each line of sight are Doppler-shifted by a different amount, and we derive for the first time the resulting observed anisotropic spectrum, which no longer factorizes into a spectral shape times an angular template. We then quantify the observability of this distortion with space-based interferometers. With their nominal noise budgets, neither LISA nor a LISA+Taiji network can detect it: the residual between the models that include and neglect the rotation has a signal-to-noise ratio ${\rm SNR}_{\rm diff}\simeq0.2$ and after two years, and the induced bias on the foreground parameters stays below . A tenfold better noise amplitude, of the order contemplated for post-LISA concepts, raises the residual to ${\rm SNR}_{\rm diff}\simeq4.6$ for the network, where the effect becomes measurable and displaces the spectral cutoff by half of the statistical error.
If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.