Gravitational-wave astronomy: Observational results and their impact

Abstract

The successful construction and operation of highly sensitive gravitational-wave detectors is an achievement to be proud of, but the detection of actual signals is still around the corner. Even so, null results from recent searches have told us some interesting things about the objects that live in our universe, so it can be argued that the era of gravitational-wave astronomy has already begun. In this article I review several of these results and discuss what we have learned from them. I then look into the not-so-distant future and predict some ways in which the detection of gravitational-wave signals will shape our knowledge of astrophysics and transform the field.

Based on invited talk at the 8th Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Columbia U, New York, June 2009); accepted by Classical and Quantum Gravity

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Tuning into Scorpius X-1: adapting a continuous gravitational-wave search for a known binary system
• Resampling to accelerate cross-correlation searches for continuous gravitational waves from binary systems