Volunteer Computing to Search the Sky for Continuous Gravitational Wave Emission
Continuous gravitational waves are nearly monochromatic, long-lasting signals. They could come from e.g. fast-rotating non-axisymmetric neutron stars.
The detection of a continuous gravitational wave is still elusive. Compared to the already detected gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences the continuous gravitational wave amplitude at Earth is orders of magnitude smaller. However, since the signal is long-lasting, one can integrate it over many months and increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
When the waveform parameters are not known, i.e. when searching for unknown galactic neutron stars, broad parameter searches are carried out and they are expensive because the number of waveforms which can be resolved over many months of observational data is extremely large. Therefore all-sky (or blind) searches for continuous waves are among the computationally most expensive gravitational wave searches. We will show the latest results of the Einstein@Home all-sky search in public O3 LIGO data.