Search for continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars in globular cluster NGC 6544

B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. D 95, 082005 – Published 19 April 2017

Abstract

We describe a directed search for continuous gravitational waves in data from the sixth initial LIGO science run. The target was the nearby globular cluster NGC 6544 at a distance of 2.7kpc. The search covered a broad band of frequencies along with first and second frequency derivatives for a fixed sky position. The search coherently integrated data from the two LIGO interferometers over a time span of 9.2 days using the matched-filtering F-statistic. We found no gravitational-wave signals and set 95% confidence upper limits as stringent as 6.0×1025 on intrinsic strain and 8.5×106 on fiducial ellipticity. These values beat the indirect limits from energy conservation for stars with characteristic spin-down ages older than 300 years and are within the range of theoretical predictions for possible neutron-star ellipticities. An important feature of this search was use of a barycentric resampling algorithm which substantially reduced computational cost; this method is used extensively in searches of Advanced LIGO and Virgo detector data.

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  • Received 12 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.082005

© 2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

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Vol. 95, Iss. 8 — 15 April 2017

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