The Arecibo Remote Command Center at UWM: Searching for ... · What are gravitational waves? •...
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The Arecibo Remote Command Center at UWM: Searching for gravitational waves using pulsars
Xavier Siemens
Sunday, November 13, 2011

What are gravitational waves?
• Predicted by Einstein in 1918, ripples in space and time analogous to electromagnetic waves
• Gravitational waves act in two directions at once!
GW direction
• The strain produced by a gravitational waveh
h =δL
L
L
δL
Astrophysical strains we expect
h ∼ 10−21
L ∼ 4 lyδL ∼ 10−5 m
+
diameter of a human hair!
Credit: Warren Anderson
Sunday, November 13, 2011

What are gravitational waves?
• Predicted by Einstein in 1918, ripples in space and time analogous to electromagnetic waves
• Gravitational waves act in two directions at once!
GW direction
• The strain produced by a gravitational waveh
h =δL
L
L
δL
Astrophysical strains we expect
h ∼ 10−21
L ∼ 4 lyδL ∼ 10−5 m
+
diameter of a human hair!
Credit: Warren Anderson
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Why bother trying to detect them?
• As we have added more frequencies with electromagnetic telescopes we have discovered amazing new things about the universe
• The idea is gravitational waves will lead us to similarly revolutionary growth in our understanding of the universe
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Burst sources-Cosmic strings, Supermassive BBH fly-bys, unknown unkowns
NASA
Types of gravitational wave sources
NASA
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Types of gravitational wave sources
Binary black hole inspirals: continuous waves
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Types of gravitational wave sources
Stochastic background
NASA
Gravitational analog of cosmic microwave backgroundSunday, November 13, 2011

Stochastic Backgrounds
Gravitational radiation produced by an extremely large number of weak, independent and unresolved gravity-wave sources.
Credit: Jolien Creighton• Astrophysical Sources:
Black Hole Binaries, NS Binaries, White Dwarf Binaries...
• Cosmological Sources: Inflation, Cosmic Strings, Preheating, Phase Transitions...
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Stochastic Backgrounds
Gravitational radiation produced by an extremely large number of weak, independent and unresolved gravity-wave sources.
Credit: Jolien Creighton• Astrophysical Sources:
Black Hole Binaries, NS Binaries, White Dwarf Binaries...
• Cosmological Sources: Inflation, Cosmic Strings, Preheating, Phase Transitions...
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pulsars Beams of radio waves
Magnetic field
Pulsars are a type of neutron star: Common end products of stellar evolution
Pulsar mass ~ 1 solar mass, size = 10 km
Pulsars are extremely dense (nuclear density) 1 teaspoon weighs 10 million tons
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Adresse Paris
paris - Google Maps http://maps.google.fr/maps?hl=fr&q=paris&ie=UTF8&hq=&hn...
1 of 1 4/27/11 3:05 PM
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Adresse Paris
paris - Google Maps http://maps.google.fr/maps?hl=fr&q=paris&ie=UTF8&hq=&hn...
1 of 1 4/27/11 3:05 PM
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pulsars Beams of radio waves
Magnetic field
Pulsars appear to us to emit short bursts (pulses) of radio waves
Pulsars are a type of neutron star: Common end products of stellar evolution
Pulsar mass ~ 1 solar mass, size = 10 km
Pulsars are extremely dense (nuclear density) 1 teaspoon weighs 10 million tons
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pulsars Beams of radio waves
Magnetic field
Pulsars appear to us to emit short bursts (pulses) of radio waves
Pulsars are a type of neutron star: Common end products of stellar evolution
Pulsar mass ~ 1 solar mass, size = 10 km
Pulsars are extremely dense (nuclear density) 1 teaspoon weighs 10 million tons
Sunday, November 13, 2011

How do we detect gravitational waves with pulsars?
• Because pulsars are extremely dense they rotate stably. We use them as clocks to construct a galactic scale GW detector
• Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that change the arrival times of the steady train of radio pulses emitted by the pulsar
gravitational waves
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Searches for gravitational waves using pulsars• We can predict when a particular pulse from a pulsar will arrive at our
radio telescope.
• But we don’t get it quite right, there are small differences between what when we expect the pulse and when it actually arrives at our radio telescope.
Arrival of pulse
A year later
Predicted arrival Actual arrival
Train of pulses 1 year ago Train of pulses today
• Gravitational waves change the time of arrival of pulses so we can look for gravitational waves in those differences
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Searches for gravitational waves in pulsar timing data
• Can do these measurements very accurately, a few times a month for a few years
Jenet, Lommen, Larson, and Wen (2004)
• Lowest frequency GW we’re sensitivty to set by observation length T
• Highest frequency by Nyquist theoremSunday, November 13, 2011

Would like to build a pulsar timing array: A network of pulsars with which to look for GWs
There are about 2000 known pulsars in our galaxy.
Only a handful suitable for gravitational wave detection, Arecibo Remote Command Center at UWM [email protected] activities
focused on finding more pulsars
David Champion
Sunday, November 13, 2011

PTAs around the world and the IPTA
NANOGrav
PPTA
EPTA
Credit: Brian Burtsee also Hobbs et al 2010
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Justin EllisUWM Graduate
Student
Kathy GustavsonScience teacher
Nicolet HS
Jean CreightonUWM Planetarium
director
Dawn ErbFaculty
David KaplanFaculty
Beth SpearScience teacher Kenosha HS
Brian VlcekUWM Graduate
Student
Sydney ChamberlinUWM Grad Student
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Research Activities Remote observing
Green Bank, WVArecibo, PR
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pulsars discovered by us (finding pulsars is hard!)
• Arecibo data
• GBT data (Fermi pulsar)
• In the last 9 months we (UWM) discovered 6-7 new pulsars (one of which is very interesting), confirmed two new millisecond pulsars
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Research Activities Data analysis
• Looked at over 400,000 of these
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Other activities
• Following up interesting candidates (radio, X-ray, gamma ray)
• Using neural networks (teach machines to do some of our work) to sort through pulsar candidates.
• Have a very large computing cluster called Nemo (~4000 CPUs), analyze the radio data we collect
Sunday, November 13, 2011