Realizing gravitational-wave astronomy through low-latency searches for binary black hole mergers with a network of high-precision gravitational-wave interferometers

目前对双黑洞和中子星合并的了解表明，高级LIGO （AdvLIGO）每年应该能探测到几到几个这样的系统，从而迎来引力波天文学的时代。其中一些系统预计也能被电磁观测站观测到。智能硬件和软件工具将被开发出来，以便在AdvLIGO和先进的处女座探测器观测到的天体物理信号仍处于活动状态时，通过将电磁天文台指向其来源，可以快速跟踪。信号的完整特征，最近通过解析解和数值相对论突破的结合而获得，将用于寻找这些二元体。这些利用互补的引力波和电磁数据进行的多信使观测，有望解决天文学中一些悬而未决的难题，比如短时间伽马射线暴的起源和暗能量的本质。这一探索将通过在普尔曼的华盛顿州立大学（WSU）主校区建立一个实验项目来帮助，并可以促进位于LIGO汉福德天文台附近的WSU- tri - cities （WSU- tc）的物理和天文学教育的发展。该校园社区有大量的西班牙裔人口，附近有美洲原住民社区。LIGO和WSU-TC在这个社区的合作为整合大学教育和前沿研究提供了难得的环境。

Current understanding of coalescing binary black holes and neutron stars suggests that Advanced LIGO (AdvLIGO) should detect somewhere between a few to several of these systems per year, thus, ushering in the age of gravitational-wave astronomy. Some of these systems are expected to be visible to electromagnetic observatories as well. Smart hardware and software tools will be developed so that an astrophysical signal observed in AdvLIGO and the advanced Virgo detector can be followed-up rapidly by pointing the electromagnetic observatories at its source, while it is still active. The complete characteristics of the signal, as made available recently through a combination of analytical solutions and numerical-relativity breakthroughs, will be used in the search for these binaries.Together, these multi-messenger observations, which use complementary gravitational-wave and electromagnetic data, promise to resolve some outstanding puzzles in astronomy, such as the origin of the short duration gamma-ray bursts and the nature of dark energy. This quest will be aided by the establishment of an experimental effort at the main campus of the Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, and could foster the growth of Physics and Astronomy education at WSU-Tri-Cities (WSU-TC), located near the site of the LIGO Hanford Observatory. That campus community has a large Hispanic population with nearby Native American communities. The co-placement of LIGO and WSU-TC in this community offers a rare setting for integrating university education with cutting edge research.