New insights into the elusive continuous waves from spinning neutron stars (w/video)

(Nanowerk News) Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometre-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, the team have witnessed the explosive collisions of black holes and neutron stars.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

New insights into the elusive continuous waves from spinning neutron stars (w/video)

(Nanowerk News) Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometre-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, the team have witnessed the explosive collisions of black holes and neutron stars.

more…

> Recent studies, however, have been looking for something quite different: the elusive signal from a solitary, rapidly-spinning neutron star.

Good luck. It’s relatively easy to search for colliding neutron stars and black holes becuse of the change in frequency. No much terrestrial noise can immitate that (except for one infamous example of a car going over a cattle grid).

But looking for steady state periodicity is much harder. There are plenty of sources of periodic gravitational wave noise on Earth, such as ocean waves.