Peter Shawhan
Department of Physics, University of Maryland
Searches for Other Spacetime Sirens
Compact binary mergers are the only type of gravitational wave signal that have been directly detected so far. While that has enabled spectacular discoveries -- and even a measurement of the Hubble constant from the "standard siren" property of a binary merger -- the data from LIGO and Virgo is also being searched for other types of signals. In this talk I would like to focus attention on searches for continuous-wave gravitational waves, which would be emitted by a rapidly rotating neutron star that is not quite axisymmetric. These searches can take advantage of integrating over long data sets, but only if Doppler shifts and amplitude modulation of the continuously emitted "siren" are properly taken into account. The potentially huge computational demands of doing that have led to the development of different strategies for different science targets. I will describe the astrophysical sources, the data analysis methods, and several search results which have recently been released.