Gravitational Wave Astrophysics and Observations
The direct observation of gravitational waves opens radically new opportunities for the study of compact objects – neutron stars and black holes – and the behaviour of extreme gravity in completed untested regimes.
A hundred years after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational radiation as an intimate consequence of General Relativity, a new class of "telescopes" is about to allow us to observe the gravitational-wave sky.
Our work spans the wide variety of challenges and opportunities in connection with present and future observations with the world-wide network of ground-based laser interferometers (, , and ) and , including:
- The astrophysics of binary systems, e.g., characterising the populations of and with gravitational-wave observations. We have developed a state-of-the-art population synthesis and astrostatistic code for this purpose.
- The development of for Bayesian inference, based on stochastic sampling techniques such as and , in order to obtain the most accurate measurements of the physical parameters of the sources.
- The actual search for gravitational waves in the data that are currently being collected by ground-based laser interferometers. See the for the most recent results of the – and the website for details.
Many of our activities are an integral part of the research efforts of the and the . We make use of state-of-the art computational facilities for simulations and data analysis, including an .