Directed searches for continuous gravitational wave signals using publicly available astronomical catalogs.
The detection of continuous waves (CWs), which are gravitational waves emitted by non-symmetric rotating neutron stars, is one of the missing pieces in gravitational wave astronomy. In our Galaxy, billions of neutron stars are expected to be present, although only a few thousand have been detected, mainly pulsars, through their electromagnetic radiation.
The information provided by electromagnetic observations is crucial to constrain the signal parameter space, lower the computational cost of a CW search and increase the number of potential targets. Depending on the available information about the source, different searches can be set up. When the only known information is the source sky position the optimal choice is to perform a so-called directed search.
The aim of this proposal is to test and improve the performances and study the results of a new directed search pipeline developed within a new data analysis framework called Band-Sampled-Data, pointing to real astrophysical objects chosen from the last release of the IBIS-INTEGRAL and the Fermi-LAT catalogs. The search will be applied to interferometric data from the LIGO and Virgo detectors, which third observational run (O3) is planned to start with an enhanced sensitivity in Fall 2018. Given the good chances to detect a CW in O3 data, an important step is to understand which physical properties of NSs internal composition (such as the equation of state) can be inferred from the gravitational wave signal.