Searches for Continuous Gravitational Waves from Nine Young Supernova Remnants

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2015

Journal / Book Title

The Astrophysical Journal

Abstract

We describe directed searches for continuous gravitational waves (GWs) in data from the sixth Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) science data run. The targets were nine young supernova remnants not associated with pulsars; eight of the remnants are associated with non-pulsing suspected neutron stars. One target's parameters are uncertain enough to warrant two searches, for a total of 10. Each search covered a broad band of frequencies and first and second frequency derivatives for a fixed sky direction. The searches coherently integrated data from the two LIGO interferometers over time spans from 5.3-25.3 days using the matched-filtering -statistic. We found no evidence of GW signals. We set 95% confidence upper limits as strong (low) as 4 × 10-25 on intrinsic strain, 2 × 10-7 on fiducial ellipticity, and 4 × 10-5 on r-mode amplitude. These beat the indirect limits from energy conservation and are within the range of theoretical predictions for neutron-star ellipticities and r-mode amplitudes.

Comments

This article is a collaboration of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Additional authors may be found on the publication.

DOI

10.1088/0004-637X/813/1/39

Published Citation

Aasi, J., Abbott, B. P., Abbott, R., Abbott, T., Abernathy, M. R., Acernese, F., ... & Chua, S. (2015). Searches for continuous gravitational waves from nine young supernova remnants. The Astrophysical Journal, 813(1), 39.

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