Skip to main content
School of Mathematical Sciences

Early Gravitational-wave Alerts for Multimessenger Astronomy with Machine Learning

Supervisor: Dr Hong Qi

Project description:

Joint observations of the multimessenger signals such as gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves emitted by a colliding neutron star pair can reveal novel mysteries of the Universe. However, so far, the only such observation was a sheer coincidence. Currently, gravitational wave detections are not real-time. Moreover, gravitational wave alerts take minutes to hours to send out. As a result, these delays make the astronomy partners unable to capture what happened during a collision, given that they also need time to point their telescopes to the correct sky area. 

As such, the core challenge of multimessenger astronomy is the early detection of gravitational waves to alarm other messenger communities to follow up. This project aims to detect gravitational waves immediately after they register at the detectors on Earth. Two tools will be used to help achieve this goal. One is machine learning, which can significantly speed up data analysis speed, but it has not been widely used in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. The second tool is a new detection method, which uses spectrogram scans, i.e., the frequency-time plots of the gravitational-wave data to train gravitational-wave detections. For example, the gravitational-wave signal of the first detected binary neutron star collision GW170817 in 2017 can be clearly identified with eyes at least 30 seconds before the collision and merger in the spectrogram plot. However, the actual detection was after the collision and the fastest detection using replayed data is 10 seconds before the merger. This method has large potential in realizing real-time detection, but very scarce research has been done on it. 

This project will use the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O3 data and simulated design sensitivity to train the detections with the tools mentioned above. The project can be easily expanded to the detections using the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors.

 

Further information:

How to apply

Entry requirements

Fees and funding

Back to top