Search for Continuous Gravitational Waves from Neutron Stars in Globular Cluster NGC 6544

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-19-2017

Keywords

Gravitational waves, Neutron stars, LIGO

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 ≈2.7  kpc. 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 6.0×10−25 on intrinsic strain and 8.5×10−6 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.

Journal Title

Physical Review D

Volume

95

Issue

8

First Page

2005

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevD.95.082005

First Department

Physics

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