Astrophysical Sources of Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background

Abstract

We review the spectral properties of stochastic backgrounds of astrophysical origin and discuss how they may differ from the primordial contribution by their statistical properties. We show that stochastic searches with the next generation of terrestrial interferometers could put interesting constrains on the physical properties of astrophysical populations, such as the ellipticity and magnetic field of magnetars, or the coalescence rate of compact binaries.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures,accepted for publication in CQG, GWDAW12 conference proceedings version corrected in comparison published version where we found an error in equation (4