Strengthening the Gravitational-Wave Event Portal

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics, and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. Gravitational-wave astronomy is one of the most rapidly evolving fields in astrophysics. Over the past eight years, NSF's LIGO and Italy's Virgo have begun to record compact object mergers of black holes and neutron stars for the first time. These discoveries are having a tremendous impact on our ability to study the population of black holes in our universe, learn about fundamental particle physics through study of the dense interiors of neutron stars, test general relativity as never before, and investigate a range of other topics. Data from these cutting-edge instruments are made available to the scientific community and the public through the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC) at gwosc.org. As LIGO and Virgo become more sensitive, the rate of discoveries is quickly accelerating. Starting in 2015, the number of observed compact object mergers has grown from 1, to 10, to 90. During the last observing run, LIGO and Virgo were observing mergers of black holes or neutron stars about once per week, and future upgrades are expected to make this rate grow. As we begin to record hundreds or thousands of these astrophysical events, the scientific community will need a new set of tools to access and analyze the information associated with these discoveries. This project will fund enhancements to the GWOSC Event Portal, which allows scientists, teachers, students, and enthusiasts around the world to browse catalogs of compact object mergers, view plots, and discover associated data. The award also includes funding to host two Open Data Workshops to train students and scientists who wish to contribute to this new field of astronomy. This award supports two activities that will expand public access to gravitational-wave (GW) data. The first project is to grow and enhance the gravitational-wave Event Portal in three ways: (i) the database will grow to include the hundreds of events expected for detection in up-coming observing runs; (ii) the Event Portal structure will be broadened to include events discovered by groups outside the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration; and (iii), the Event Portal will become more interactive with new plotting features. As the second project, this award will support two Gravitational Wave Open Data Workshops in the first and third years of the proposal. These innovative workshops gather thousands of researchers who are new to gravitational-wave data analysis with a “hands-on” introduction to the methods of the field. The workshops center on software tutorials prepared by expert analysts, who also attend the workshop to provide mentoring. Following each workshop, software tutorials and video lectures are posted to a free online course, creating opportunities for thousands of students to learn gravitational-wave data analysis at any time throughout the year. 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.