Searching for a Galactic Excess of Gravitational Waves

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Abstract:: No source of gravitational waves from the Milky Way galaxy is known to radiate within both the amplitude and frequency ranges of Advanced LIGO or Virgo. It is, however, possible that an unknown galactic source is emitting gravitational radiation at frequencies accessible to current detectors, but is too weak to be individually resolvable. If so, it would be easier to identify the source if we could recover the sky distribution of the population. We develop a method of mapping the sky distribution of unmodeled gravitational-wave bursts to determine whether there exists a galactic excess of gravitational waves in the aLIGO-Virgo frequency band. We simulate both an isotropic population and a galactically-distributed population of gravitational-wave bursts and inject these two sets into the parameter estimation code Bayeswave in order to generate posterior probability distributions on our simulated signals’ sky locations. We will ultimately combine these into probability distributions of source locations for each of our two populations and demonstrate that we can correctly classify our two distributions based on their recovered localizations.

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LIGO Document T1800281-v4