LIGO, VIRGO, AND KAGRA RELEASE NEW RESULTS FROM SEARCHES FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

12 Jul 2021 — In two papers recently submitted to the arXiv, LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA released results of two different searches for gravitational waves in data from the detectors’ third Observing Run. In the first paper we carried out an all-sky search for bulges on rapidly-spinning neutron stars, which would produce a continuous gravitational-wave signal. Although no detections were found, our latest analysis greatly improved the sensitivity over previous all-sky searches. In the second paper we searched for short-duration “bursts” of gravitational waves using two different search algorithms that make minimal assumptions about the details of the gravitational-wave signal. Again, no detections were found, but our search improved upper limits on the rate per unit volume of burst sources by roughly an order of magnitude.
Science summaries for these two papers are also available here and here.