Enhancing the Discovery Potential of Merging Black Holes with Robust Extraction of Spin-Precession and Eccentricity

通过自旋进动和偏心率的稳健提取增强合并黑洞的发现潜力

基本信息

批准号：
2308770
负责人：
Katerina Chatziioannou
金额：
$ 29.48万
依托单位：
California Institute of Technology
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2023
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2023-07-01 至 2026-06-30
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2308770&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Enhancing Discovery Potential Merging Black

项目摘要

This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics, and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. Since the first detection of gravitational waves from the coalescence of two black holes in 2015, the nascent field of gravitational wave astrophysics is on an accelerating trajectory with dozens more detections, including black hole, neutron star, and mixed neutron star-black hole binaries. This spectacular progress is driven by the improving sensitivity of the LIGO/Virgo detectors and advances in analysis techniques. The fourth observing campaign will more than quadruple the number of detections and offer a wealth of information about the most powerful astronomical events. This wealth of information will answer key questions about black holes, but also bring new challenges: such precise measurements must be accompanied by a careful assessment of potential sources of systematic errors. This award focuses on systematic uncertainties originating by issues with the quality of data, known as glitches. The main goal is to provide robust constraints on some of the most elusive properties of black holes in binaries: their spins and the eccentricity of their orbit.This project focuses on gravitational wave signal from black holes and neutron stars that overlap with instrumental artifacts in the detectors, known as glitches. Past experience indicates that the increased rate of detection expected during the fourth observing run will result in more instances of such overlaps that jeopardize astrophysical parameter estimation. Existing mitigation techniques based on modeling and subtracting the glitch result in robust inference of black hole masses and spins aligned with the orbit. The goal in this award is to extend glitch-mitigation techniques to robustly measure more subtle physical effects such as spins in the orbital plane (spin-precession) and orbital eccentricity, effects that can provide invaluable information about the astrophysical formation environment of compact binaries. This award tackles eccentricity and spin-precession inference in the presence of data quality issues along two fronts. The first relates to the observed signals where the group will use traditional inference to study the phenomenology and measurability of spin-precession and eccentricity from merger-dominated signals in the next observing run and beyond. The second turns to the detector noise where the group will construct a novel approach that is inspired by astrophysical population inference: they use detector data to infer the population properties of various glitch families and then obtain source inference that marginalizes over data quality issues by using the glitch population distributions as priors. This work increases the likelihood of a measurement of eccentricity or spin-precession during the fourth observing run that is robust against data quality issues.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项支持相对论和相对论天体物理学的研究，并涉及美国国家科学基金会“宇宙之窗”大创意的优先领域。自 2015 年首次探测到两个黑洞合并产生的引力波以来，引力波天体物理学的新生领域正处于加速发展的轨道上，目前已进行了数十次探测，包括黑洞、中子星以及混合中子星-黑洞双星。这一惊人的进步是由 LIGO/Virgo 探测器灵敏度的提高和分析技术的进步推动的。第四次观测活动将使探测数量增加四倍以上，并提供有关最强大天文事件的大量信息。这些丰富的信息将回答有关黑洞的关键问题，但也带来了新的挑战：这种精确的测量必须伴随着对系统误差的潜在来源的仔细评估。该奖项重点关注由数据质量问题（称为故障）引起的系统不确定性。主要目标是对双星中黑洞的一些最难以捉摸的特性提供强有力的约束：它们的自旋和轨道的偏心率。该项目重点关注来自黑洞和中子星的引力波信号，这些信号与双星中的仪器工件重叠。探测器，称为故障。过去的经验表明，第四次观测期间预期探测率的增加将导致更多此类重叠的实例，从而危及天体物理参数估计。现有的基于建模和消除故障的缓解技术可以对黑洞质量和与轨道对齐的自旋进行可靠的推断。该奖项的目标是扩展故障缓解技术，以稳健地测量更微妙的物理效应，例如轨道平面中的自旋（自旋进动）和轨道偏心率，这些效应可以提供有关致密双星的天体物理形成环境的宝贵信息。该奖项解决了两个方面存在数据质量问题时的偏心率和自旋进动推理问题。第一个与观测到的信号有关，该小组将使用传统的推理来研究下一次观测及以后的合并主导信号的自旋进动和偏心率的现象学和可测量性。第二个转向探测器噪声，该小组将构建一种受天体物理学总体推断启发的新颖方法：他们使用探测器数据来推断各种故障家族的总体属性，然后通过使用边缘化数据质量问题来获得源推断。作为先验的故障人口分布。这项工作增加了在第四次观测运行期间测量偏心率或自旋进动的可能性，该测量对数据质量问题具有鲁棒性。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响进行评估，被认为值得支持审查标准。