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Photons, neutrinos, and gravitational-wave astronomy
Materials: Chapter 15 in Tauris & Van den Heuvel 2023 book, Schutz 1984, Landau & Lifschitz vol. 2, LVK Collaboration 2017, Chen et al.
The addition of gravitational waves (GW) adds a completely new way to study astrophysical sources, probing optically thick and thus inaccessible regions, and regimes where gravity is strong(i.e., a full general relativistic treatment of the interaction of matter with space-time becomes necessary). Skipping ahead to the 21 st century, the first direct detection came from ground-based interferometric observations performed by the Laser Interferometry gravitational observatory(LIGO) laboratory – after \(\sim50\) years of continued effort. The current rate of GW detection within the frequency range of LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA is very high, and by the end-of-life of these most-precise machines ever built, we expect to have a sizeable population of GW-driven mergers of compact objects.
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