0000000000153674
AUTHOR
Alessandro Nagar
All-sky search in early O3 LIGO data for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown neutron stars in binary systems
Rapidly spinning neutron stars are promising sources of continuous gravitational waves. Detecting such a signal would allow probing of the physical properties of matter under extreme conditions. A significant fraction of the known pulsar population belongs to binary systems. Searching for unknown neutron stars in binary systems requires specialized algorithms to address unknown orbital frequency modulations. We present a search for continuous gravitational waves emitted by neutron stars in binary systems in early data from the third observing run of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors using the semicoherent, GPU-accelerated, binaryskyhough pipeline. The search analyzes the most s…
All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in the first Advanced LIGO observing run
Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-26T17:45:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2018-03-22 Australian Research Council Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India Department of Science and Technology, India Science AMP; Engineering Research Board (SERB), India Ministry of Human Resource Development, India Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion Vicepresidencia i Conselleria d'Innovacio, Recerca i Turisme Conselleria d'Educacio i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana National Science Centre of Poland Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Russian Foundation for Basic Rese…
Tests of General Relativity with GW170817
The recent discovery by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo of a gravitational wave signal from a binary neutron star inspiral has enabled tests of general relativity (GR) with this new type of source. This source, for the first time, permits tests of strong-field dynamics of compact binaries in presence of matter. In this paper, we place constraints on the dipole radiation and possible deviations from GR in the post-Newtonian coefficients that govern the inspiral regime. Bounds on modified dispersion of gravitational waves are obtained; in combination with information from the observed electromagnetic counterpart we can also constrain effects due to large extra dimensions. Finally, the polari…
Accretion-induced quasinormal mode excitation of a Schwarzschild black hole
By combining the numerical solution of the nonlinear hydrodynamics equations with the solution of the linear inhomogeneous Zerilli-Moncrief and Regge-Wheeler equations we investigate the properties of the gravitational radiation emitted during the axisymmetric accretion of matter onto a Schwarzschild black hole. The matter models considered include quadrupolar dust shells and thick accretion disks, permitting us to simulate situations which may be encountered at the end stages of stellar gravitational collapse or binary neutron star merger. We focus on the interference pattern appearing in the energy spectra of the emitted gravitational waves and on the amount of excitation of the quasi-nor…
Erratum: “Searches for Gravitational Waves from Known Pulsars at Two Harmonics in 2015–2017 LIGO Data” (2019, ApJ, 879, 10)
Two analysis errors have been identified that affect the results for a handful of the high-value pulsars given in Table 1 of Abbott et al. (2019). One affects the Bayesian analysis for the five pulsars that glitched during the analysis period, and the other affects the 5n-vector analysis for J0711-6830. Updated results after correcting the errors are shown in Table 1, which now supersedes the results given for those pulsars in Table 1 of Abbott et al. (2019). Updated versions of figures can be seen in Figures 1-4. Bayesian analysis.-For the glitching pulsars, the signal phase evolution caused by the glitch was wrongly applied twice and was therefore not consistent with our expected model of…
Gauge-invariant Non-spherical Metric Perturbations of Schwarzschild Black-Hole Spacetimes
The theory of gauge-invariant non-spherical metric perturbations of Schwarzschild black hole spacetimes is now well established. Yet, as different notations and conventions have been used throughout the years, the literature on the subject is often confusing and sometimes confused. The purpose of this paper is to review and collect the relevant expressions related to the Regge-Wheeler and Zerilli equations for the odd and even-parity perturbations of a Schwarzschild spacetime. Special attention is paid to the form they assume in the presence of matter-sources and, for the two most popular conventions in the literature, to the asymptotic expressions and gravitational-wave amplitudes. Besides…
GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150 M⊙
LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration: et al.
Constraining the p -Mode– g -Mode Tidal Instability with GW170817
We analyze the impact of a proposed tidal instability coupling p modes and g modes within neutron stars on GW170817. This nonresonant instability transfers energy from the orbit of the binary to internal modes of the stars, accelerating the gravitational-wave driven inspiral. We model the impact of this instability on the phasing of the gravitational wave signal using three parameters per star: An overall amplitude, a saturation frequency, and a spectral index. Incorporating these additional parameters, we compute the Bayes factor (lnB!pgpg) comparing our p-g model to a standard one. We find that the observed signal is consistent with waveform models that neglect p-g effects, with lnB!pgpg=…
The advanced Virgo longitudinal control system for the O2 observing run
Following a successful period of data-taking between 2006 and 2011, the Virgo gravitational-wave detector was taken offline for a major upgrade. The changes made to the instrument significantly increased the complexity of the control systems and meant that an extended period of commissioning was required to reach a sensitivity appropriate for science data-taking. This commissioning period was completed in July of 2017 and the second-generation Advanced Virgo detector went on to join the Advanced LIGO detectors in the O2 science run in August of the same year. The upgraded detector was approximately twice as sensitive to binary neutron star mergers as the first-generation instrument. During …
Time delay in binary systems
The aim of this paper is to study the time delay on electromagnetic signals propagating across a binary stellar system. We focus on the antisymmetric gravitomagnetic contribution due to the angular momentum of one of the stars of the pair. Considering a pulsar as the source of the signals, the effect would be manifest both in the arrival times of the pulses and in the frequency shift of their Fourier spectra. We derive the appropriate formulas and we discuss the influence of different configurations on the observability of gravitomagnetic effects. We argue that the recently discovered PSR J0737-3039 binary system does not permit the detection of the effects because of the large size of the …
Time-domain effective-one-body gravitational waveforms for coalescing compact binaries with nonprecessing spins, tides and self-spin effects
We present TEOBResumS, a new effective-one-body (EOB) waveform model for nonprecessing (spin-aligned) and tidally interacting compact binaries.Spin-orbit and spin-spin effects are blended together by making use of the concept of centrifugal EOB radius. The point-mass sector through merger and ringdown is informed by numerical relativity (NR) simulations of binary black holes (BBH) computed with the SpEC and BAM codes. An improved, NR-based phenomenological description of the postmerger waveform is developed.The tidal sector of TEOBResumS describes the dynamics of neutron star binaries up to merger and incorporates a resummed attractive potential motivated by recent advances in the post-Newt…
Gravitational-wave Constraints on the Equatorial Ellipticity of Millisecond Pulsars
We present a search for continuous gravitational waves from five radio pulsars, comprising three recycled pulsars (PSR J0437-4715, PSR J0711-6830, and PSR J0737-3039A) and two young pulsars: the Crab pulsar (J0534+2200) and the Vela pulsar (J0835-4510). We use data from the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo combined with data from their first and second observing runs. For the first time, we are able to match (for PSR J0437-4715) or surpass (for PSR J0711-6830) the indirect limits on gravitational-wave emission from recycled pulsars inferred from their observed spin-downs, and constrain their equatorial ellipticities to be less than 10-8. For each of the five pulsars, we perfor…
GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
On August 17, 2017 at 12-41:04 UTC the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors made their first observation of a binary neutron star inspiral. The signal, GW170817, was detected with a combined signal-to-noise ratio of 32.4 and a false-alarm-rate estimate of less than one per 8.0×104 years. We infer the component masses of the binary to be between 0.86 and 2.26 M, in agreement with masses of known neutron stars. Restricting the component spins to the range inferred in binary neutron stars, we find the component masses to be in the range 1.17-1.60 M, with the total mass of the system 2.74-0.01+0.04M. The source was localized within a sky region of 28 deg2 (90% probabili…
A Gravitational-wave Measurement of the Hubble Constant Following the Second Observing Run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo
This paper presents the gravitational-wave measurement of the Hubble constant (H 0) using the detections from the first and second observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detector network. The presence of the transient electromagnetic counterpart of the binary neutron star GW170817 led to the first standard-siren measurement of H 0. Here we additionally use binary black hole detections in conjunction with galaxy catalogs and report a joint measurement. Our updated measurement is H 0 = km s-1 Mpc-1 (68.3% of the highest density posterior interval with a flat-in-log prior) which is an improvement by a factor of 1.04 (about 4%) over the GW170817-only value of km s-1 Mpc-1. A significant …
Gravitational waves from oscillating accretion tori: Comparison between different approaches
Quasi-periodic oscillations of high density thick accretion disks orbiting a Schwarzschild black hole have been recently addressed as interesting sources of gravitational waves. The aim of this paper is to compare the gravitational waveforms emitted from these sources when computed using (variations of) the standard quadrupole formula and gauge-invariant metric perturbation theory. To this goal we evolve representative disk models using an existing general relativistic hydrodynamics code which has been previously employed in investigations of such astrophysical systems. Two are the main results of this work: First, for stable and marginally stable disks, no excitation of the black hole quas…
Accretion-driven gravitational radiation from nonrotating compact objects. Infalling quadrupolar shells
This paper reports results from numerical simulations of the gravitational radiation emitted from non--rotating compact objects(both neutron stars and Schwarzschild black holes) as a result of the accretion of matter. A hybrid procedure is adopted: we evolve, in axisymmetry, the linearized equations describing metric and fluid perturbations, coupled with a nonlinear hydrodynamics code that calculates the motion of the accreting matter. The initial matter distribution is shaped in the form of extended quadrupolar shells of dust or perfect fluid. Self--gravity and radiation reaction effects of the accreting fluid are neglected. This idealized setup is used to understand the qualitative featur…
GW170817: Measurements of Neutron Star Radii and Equation of State
On 17 August 2017, the LIGO and Virgo observatories made the first direct detection of gravitational waves from the coalescence of a neutron star binary system. The detection of this gravitational-wave signal, GW170817, offers a novel opportunity to directly probe the properties of matter at the extreme conditions found in the interior of these stars. The initial, minimal-assumption analysis of the LIGO and Virgo data placed constraints on the tidal effects of the coalescing bodies, which were then translated to constraints on neutron star radii. Here, we expand upon previous analyses by working under the hypothesis that both bodies were neutron stars that are described by the same equation…