Tag Archives: LIGO

Living Reviews in Relativity: “Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo”

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Living Reviews in Relativity has published a new article on “Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo” by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration on 8 February 2016.

Please find the abstract and further details below.

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PUB.NO. lrr-2016-1
B. P. Abbott et al. (The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration)
“Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo”

ACCEPTED: 2016-01-22
PUBLISHED: 2016-02-08

FULL ARTICLE AT:
http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2016-1

ABSTRACT:
We present a possible observing scenario for the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors over the next decade, with the intention of providing information to the astronomy community to facilitate planning for multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves. We determine the expected sensitivity of the network to transient gravitational-wave signals, and study the capability of the network to determine the sky location of the source. We report our findings for gravitational-wave transients, with particular focus on gravitational-wave signals from the inspiral of binary neutron-star systems, which are considered the most promising for multi-messenger astronomy. The ability to localize the sources of the detected signals depends on the geographical distribution of the detectors and their relative sensitivity, and 90% credible regions can be as large as thousands of square degrees when only two sensitive detectors are operational. Determining the sky position of a significant fraction of detected signals to areas of 5 deg^2 to 20 deg^2 will require at least three detectors of sensitivity within a factor of ~2 of each other and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Should the third LIGO detector be relocated to India as expected, a significant fraction of gravitational-wave signals will be localized to a few square degrees by gravitational-wave observations alone.

UPCOMING ARTICLES AT:
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/upcoming.html

LIGO Laboratory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration release 2 years of data from their Fifth Science Run

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The LIGO Laboratory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) announces the public release of two years of data taken by the three LIGO gravitational-wave detectors the during its fifth science run, 2005-2007 (S5). The full announcement is at http://www.ligo.org/news/s5-data-release.php and the data is released at https://losc.ligo.org

LIGO Open Data Survey

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Dear Astronomer,

Gravitational wave astronomy is coming, thanks to the LIGO and Virgo advanced detectors that will be online at or after 2015. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration will release open data to the broader community, including rapid alerts for follow-up observation, and the detected strain corresponding to astrophysical detections. In order to make the open data program most useful to astronomers, LIGO is asking you to fill in a survey about what you see as most important for us to support.

Please take a few minutes to fill in the survey on LIGO Open Data at the link below. You don’t have to answer all the questions. We really appreciate your time and thoughts.

Thank you
Patrick Brady
Roy Williams
LIGO Scientific Collaboration

NINJA-2 project

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The Numerical INJection Analysis project (NINJA) is a collaboration between researchers in numerical relativity and gravitational wave data-analysis. The basic idea is to embed numerically computed gravitational waveforms into noise representative of the LIGO and VIRGO detectors. The resulting data-sets are then analysed to gain insight into the properties of gravitational wave data-analysis pipelines. The first NINJA project was a great success with the final paper being published in August.

A more ambitious follow-on project, NINJA-2, is just getting underway, and everybody interested in the project is welcome to join. The kick-off telecon for this project took place on October 15, 2009. NINJA-2 aims to examine non-precessing binary black holes in realistic detector noise: Long gravitational waveforms (obtained by combining an analytical post-Newtonian inspiral waveform with a fully numerical merger simulation) are injected into realistic LIGO/Virgo detector noise; the resulting data-sets are then analysed to gain insight into properties and efficiencies of data-analysis pipelines.

The minutes of this telecon, as well as further information about NINJA-2 are posted on the NINJA-webpage http://www.ninja-project.org. Follow-on discussions of the telecon are handled via the mailing list ninja@aei.mpg.de. Please subscribe to this list at
http://lists.aei.mpg.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ninja