Einstein@Home's most sensitive continuous gravitational-wave search

The results of Einstein@Home's deepest search yet for elusive continuous gravitational waves were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

These waves are expected to come from neutron stars in our galaxy, but have yet to be detected (see our video on YouTube or our info page for more). Since we don't know the locations of these neutron stars in the sky, how fast they spin, or how quickly they slow down, we search the entire sky over a wide range of frequencies and frequency changes.

Thanks to your continued support and donations of computing time, and additional computing cycles on three supercomputers at the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, our team was able to analyze public LIGO data from the third observing run (O3) in a deep, wide-band, all-sky search.

All hardware injections – signals "added" artificially to the data by moving the mirrors in the LIGO instruments – within the search range were recovered. This search was the first ever to successfully detected hardware injection #11.

We did not find any astrophysical signals. In the most sensitive frequency band, the upper limits on the amplitude of continuous gravitational waves improved by around 70% compared to the most sensitive LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA analyses of O3 data.

To quote from the acknowledgments section of the paper:

"We thank the Einstein@Home volunteers, without the support of whom this search could not have happened."