CRA Seminar: Caitlin Rose, Georgia Tech [ Surabhi Sachdev]

Title: Facilitating Multi-Messenger Astrophysics with Timely Information about Gravitational Waves

Abstract:

In the age of multi-messenger astrophysics, providing timely information about gravitational-wave events is vital to achieve coincident detections. Electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves originating from compact binary coalescences containing at least one neutron star can help answer unsolved questions in physics such as the rate of expansion of the universe and the neutron star equation of state, describing how matter behaves in extreme densities. Rapid PE is a parallelized Bayesian parameter estimation scheme designed to facilitate these follow-up observations by quickly estimating parameters such as the component masses of these binaries with gravitational waves detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration. In this seminar, I will present our results on the use of this method to provide reliable source classification updates for binary black hole (BBH), binary neutron star (BNS), and neutron star-black hole (NSBH) mergers within a few minutes of detection.