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Register a new userNANOGrav Education and Outreach: Growing a Diverse and Inclusive Collaboration for Low-Frequency Gravitational Wave Astronomy
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The new field of gravitational wave astrophysics requires a growing pool of students and researchers with unique, interdisciplinary skill sets. It also offers an opportunity to build a diverse, inclusive astronomy community from the ground up. We describe the efforts used by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) NSF Physics Frontiers Center to foster such growth by involving students at all levels in low-frequency gravitational wave astrophysics with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) and establishing collaboration policies that ensure broad participation by diverse groups. We describe and illustrate the impact of these techniques on our collaboration as a case study for other distributed collaborations.
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This Astro2010 science white paper provides an overview of the opportunities in low-frequency gravitational-wave astronomy, a new field that is poised to make significant advances. While discussing the broad context of gravitational-wave astronomy, this paper concentrates on the low-frequency region (10^(-5) to 1 Hz), a frequency range abundantly populated in strong sources of gravitational waves including massive black hole mergers, ultra-compact stellar-mass galactic binaries, and capture of compact objects by massive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies.
IAU Inter-Commission B2-C1-C2 WG Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach (DAEPO) was launched officially in April 2017. With the development of many mega-science astronomical projects, for example CTA, DESI, EUCLID, FAST, GAIA, JWST, LAMOST, LSST, SDSS, SKA, and large scale simulations, astronomy has become a Big Data science. Astronomical data is not only necessary resource for scientific research, but also very valuable resource for education and public outreach (EPO), especially in the era of Internet and Cloud Computing. IAU WG Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach is hosted at the IAU Division B (Facilities, Technologies and Data Science) Commission B2 (Data and Documentation), and organized jointly with Commission C1 (Astronomy Education and Development), Commission C2 (Communicating Astronomy with the Public), Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD), Office for Astronomy Outreach (OAO) and several other non IAU communities, including IVOA Education Interest Group, American Astronomical Society Worldwide Telescope Advisory Board, Zooniverse project and International Planetarium Society. The working group has the major objectives to: Act as a forum to discuss the value of astronomy data in EPO, the advantages and benefits of data driven EPO, and the challenges facing to data driven EPO; Provide guidelines, curriculum, data resources, tools, and e-infrastructure for data driven EPO; Provide best practices of data driven EPO. In the paper, backgrounds, current status and working plans in the future are introduced. More information about the WG is available at: http://daepo.china-vo.org/
Maximizing the public impact of astronomy projects in the next decade requires NSF-funded centers to support the development of online, mobile-friendly outreach and education activities. EPO teams with astronomy, education, and web development expertise should be in place to build accessible programs at scale and support astronomers doing outreach.
In this paper we present the results of the first low frequency all-sky search of continuous gravitational wave signals conducted on Virgo VSR2 and VSR4 data. The search covered the full sky, a frequency range between 20 Hz and 128 Hz with a range of spin-down between $-1.0 times 10^{-10}$ Hz/s and $+1.5 times 10^{-11}$ Hz/s, and was based on a hierarchical approach. The starting point was a set of short Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), of length 8192 seconds, built from the calibrated strain data. Aggressive data cleaning, both in the time and frequency domains, has been done in order to remove, as much as possible, the effect of disturbances of instrumental origin. On each dataset a number of candidates has been selected, using the FrequencyHough transform in an incoherent step. Only coincident candidates among VSR2 and VSR4 have been examined in order to strongly reduce the false alarm probability, and the most significant candidates have been selected. Selected candidates have been subject to a follow-up by constructing a new set of longer FFTs followed by a further incoherent analysis, still based on the FrequencyHough transform. No evidence for continuous gravitational wave signals was found, therefore we have set a population-based joint VSR2-VSR4 90$%$ confidence level upper limit on the dimensionless gravitational wave strain in the frequency range between 20 Hz and 128 Hz. This is the first all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves conducted, on data of ground-based interferometric detectors, at frequencies below 50 Hz. We set upper limits in the range between about $10^{-24}$ and $2times 10^{-23}$ at most frequencies. Our upper limits on signal strain show an improvement of up to a factor of $sim$2 with respect to the results of previous all-sky searches at frequencies below $80~mathrm{Hz}$.
On a time scale of years to decades, gravitational wave (GW) astronomy will become a reality. Low frequency (nanoHz) GWs are detectable through long-term timing observations of the most stable pulsars. Radio observatories worldwide are currently carrying out observing programmes to detect GWs, with data sets being shared through the International Pulsar Timing Array project. One of the most likely sources of low frequency GWs are supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), detectable as a background due to a large number of binaries, or as continuous or burst emission from individual sources. No GW signal has yet been detected, but stringent constraints are already being placed on galaxy evolution models. The SKA will bring this research to fruition. In this chapter, we describe how timing observations using SKA1 will contribute to detecting GWs, or can confirm a detection if a first signal already has been identified when SKA1 commences observations. We describe how SKA observations will identify the source(s) of a GW signal, search for anisotropies in the background, improve models of galaxy evolution, test theories of gravity, and characterise the early inspiral phase of a SMBHB system. We describe the impact of the large number of millisecond pulsars to be discovered by the SKA; and the observing cadence, observation durations, and instrumentation required to reach the necessary sensitivity. We describe the noise processes that will influence the achievable precision with the SKA. We assume a long-term timing programme using the SKA1-MID array and consider the implications of modifications to the current design. We describe the possible benefits from observations using SKA1-LOW. Finally, we describe GW detection prospects with SKA1 and SKA2, and end with a description of the expectations of GW astronomy.
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