Devour thy Neighbor: An artist's illustration of two neutron stars close to merger look misshaped, becoming more oblong the closer they get to one another. A black hole is then formed and gamma rays shoot out as a GRB.
Credit: NASA/Swift
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration currently plan to start taking data in 2015, and we expect the sensitivity of the network to improve over time. Gravitational-wave transient candidates will be identified promptly upon acquisition of the data; we aim for distributing information with an initial latency of a few tens of minutes initially, possibly improving later. The LSC and the Virgo Collaboration (LVC) are now working to develop a program of accompanying electromagnetic observations. Early positional accuracies of the GW candidates will evolve in time, as described in
arxiv.org:1304.0670. During early science runs before publication of the first four gravitational wave events, alerts will be available only through partnerships to be developed under this program (ref.
LIGO-M1200055). Partners will be asked to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) involving an agreement on deliverables, publication policies, confidentiality, and reporting. After the publication of the first four gravitational wave events, the current LVC plan is to release alerts on all highly significant detection candidates promptly to the entire scientific community.
Open call for Letters of Interest The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (
KICP) at the
University of Chicago and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (
CIERA) at
Northwestern University will co-host the meeting on September 10-11, 2013, held on the University of Chicago campus. The meeting will be held in the afternoon of the first day and the morning of the second day.
