The art and science of black hole mergers

The merger of two black holes is one of the most extraordinary events in the natural world. Made of pure gravity, the holes combine to form a single hole, emitting a strong burst of gravitational radiation. Ground-based detectors are currently searching for such bursts from holes formed in the evolution of binary stars, and indeed the very first gravitational wave event detected may well be a black-hole merger. The space-based LISA detector is being designed to search for such bursts from merging massive black holes in the centers of galaxies, events that would emit many thousands of solar masses of pure gravitational wave energy over a period of only a few minutes. To assist gravitational wave astronomers in their searches, and to be in a position to understand the details of what they see, numerical relativists are performing supercomputer simulations of these events. I review here the state of the art of these simulations, what we have learned from them so far, and what challenges remain before we have a full prediction of the waveforms to be expected from these events.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of "Growing Black Holes", Garching 21-25 June 200

Sources of radiation from neutron stars

I give a brief introduction to the problem of detecting gravitational radiation from neutron stars. After a review of the mechanisms by which such stars may produce radiation, I consider the different search strategies appropriate to the different kinds of sources: isolated known pulsars, neutron stars in binaries, and unseen neutron stars. The problem of an all-sky survey for unseen stars is the most taxing one that we face in analysing data from interferometers. I describe the kinds of hierarchical methods that are now being investigated to reach the maximal sensitivity, and I suggest a replacement for standard Fourier-transform search methods that requires fewer floating-point operations for Fourier-based searches over large parameter spaces, and in addition is highly parallelizable, working just as well on a loosely coupled network of workstations as on a tightly coupled parallel computer.Comment: 11 pages, no figure

Getting Ready for GEO600 Data

Data of good quality is expected from a number of gravitational wave detectors within the next two years. One of these, GEO600, has special capabilities, such as narrow-band operation. I describe here the preparations that are currently being made for the analysis of GEO600 data.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, proceedings of Yukawa International Seminar 199

Gravitational Wave Astronomy: Delivering on the Promises

Now that LIGO and Virgo have begun to detect gravitational wave events with regularity, the field of gravitational wave astronomy is beginning to realise its promise. Binary black holes and, very recently, binary neutron stars have been observed, and we are already learning much from them. The future, with improved sensitivity, more detectors, and detectors like LISA in different frequency bands, has even more promise to open a completely hidden side of the Universe to our exploration.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, presented at a discussion meeting "Promises of gravitational wave astronomy" held at the Royal Society London, 11 September 201

Sources of gravitational waves

Sources of low frequency gravitational radiation are reviewed from an astrophysical point of view. Cosmological sources include the formation of massive black holes in galactic nuclei, the capture by such holes of neutron stars, the coalescence of orbiting pairs of giant black holes, and various means of producing a stochastic background of gravitational waves in the early universe. Sources local to our Galaxy include various kinds of close binaries and coalescing binaries. Gravitational wave astronomy can provide information that no other form of observing can supply; in particular, the positive identification of a cosmological background originating in the early universe would be an event as significant as was the detection of the cosmic microwave background

Time-Symmetric ADI and Causal Reconnection: Stable Numerical Techniques for Hyperbolic Systems on Moving Grids

Moving grids are of interest in the numerical solution of hydrodynamical problems and in numerical relativity. We show that conventional integration methods for the simple wave equation in one and more than one dimension exhibit a number of instabilities on moving grids. We introduce two techniques, which we call causal reconnection and time-symmetric ADI, which together allow integration of the wave equation with absolute local stability in any number of dimensions on grids that may move very much faster than the wave speed and that can even accelerate. These methods allow very long time-steps, are fully second-order accurate, and offer the computational efficiency of operator-splitting.Comment: 45 pages, 19 figures. Published in 1994 but not previously available in the electronic archive

End-to-end algorithm for hierarchical area searches for long-duration GW sources for GEO 600

We describe a hierarchical, highly parallel computer algorithm to perform searches for unknown sources of continuous gravitational waves -- spinning neutron stars in the Galaxy -- over wide areas of the sky and wide frequency bandwidths. We optimize the algorithm for an observing period of 4 months and an available computing power of 20 Gflops, in a search for neutron stars resembling millisecond pulsars. We show that, if we restrict the search to the galactic plane, the method will detect any star whose signal is stronger than 15 times the $1\sigma$ noise level of a detector over that search period. Since on grounds of confidence the minimum identifiable signal should be about 10 times noise, our algorithm does only 50% worse than this and runs on a computer with achievable processing speed.Comment: 7 pages, for proceedings of Jan 1999 Moriond meeting "Gravitational Waves and Experimental Gravity

The generalized F-statistic: multiple detectors and multiple GW pulsars

The F-statistic, derived by Jaranowski, Krolak & Schutz (1998), is the optimal (frequentist) statistic for the detection of nearly periodic gravitational waves from known neutron stars, in the presence of stationary, Gaussian detector noise. The F-statistic was originally derived for the case of a single detector, whose noise spectral density was assumed constant in time, and for a single known neutron star. Here we show how the F-statistic can be straightforwardly generalized to the cases of 1) a network of detectors with time-varying noise curves, and 2) a population of known sources. Fortunately, all the important ingredients that go into our generalized F-statistics are already calculated in the single-source/single-detector searches that are currently implemented, e.g., in the LIGO Software Library, so implementation of optimal multi-detector, multi-source searches should require negligible additional cost in computational power or software development.Comment: 6 pages, 0 figures, submitted to PRD; section IV substantially enlarged and revised, and a few typos correcte

Constraining the Equation of State with Moment of Inertia Measurements

We estimate that the moment of inertia of star A in the recently discovered double pulsar system PSR J0737-3039 may be determined after a few years of observation to something like 10% accuracy. This would enable accurate estimates of the radius of the star and the presure of matter in the vicinity of 1 to 2 times the nuclear saturation density, which would in turn provide strong constraints on the equation of state of neutron stars and the physics of their interiors.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 4 figure