Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA

KAGRA Collaboration, LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

906 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present possible observing scenarios for the Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA gravitational-wave detectors over the next decade, with the intention of providing information to the astronomy community to facilitate planning for multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves. We estimate the sensitivity of the network to transient gravitational-wave signals, and study the capability of the network to determine the sky location of the source. We report our findings for gravitational-wave transients, with particular focus on gravitational-wave signals from the inspiral of binary neutron star systems, which are the most promising targets for multi-messenger astronomy. The ability to localize the sources of the detected signals depends on the geographical distribution of the detectors and their relative sensitivity, and 90 % credible regions can be as large as thousands of square degrees when only two sensitive detectors are operational. Determining the sky position of a significant fraction of detected signals to areas of 5–20deg2 requires at least three detectors of sensitivity within a factor of ∼ 2 of each other and with a broad frequency bandwidth. When all detectors, including KAGRA and the third LIGO detector in India, reach design sensitivity, a significant fraction of gravitational-wave signals will be localized to a few square degrees by gravitational-wave observations alone.

Original languageEnglish
Article number3
JournalLiving Reviews in Relativity
Volume21
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2018
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s).

Keywords

  • Data analysis
  • Electromagnetic counterparts
  • Gravitational waves
  • Gravitational-wave detectors

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