RESUMEN
In a binary black hole merger, it is known that the inspiral portion of the waveform corresponds to two distinct horizons orbiting each other and that the merger and ringdown signals correspond to the final horizon being formed and settling down to equilibrium. However, we still lack a detailed understanding of the relation between the horizon geometry in these three regimes and the observed waveform. Here we show that the well-known inspiral chirp waveform has a clear counterpart on black hole horizons, namely, the shear of the outgoing null rays at the horizon. We demonstrate that the shear behaves very much like a compact binary coalescence waveform with increasing frequency and amplitude. Furthermore, the parameters of the system estimated from the horizon agree with those estimated from the waveform. This implies that even though black hole horizons are causally disconnected from us, assuming general relativity to be true, we can potentially infer some of their detailed properties from gravitational wave observations.
RESUMEN
We show how gravitational-wave observations with advanced detectors of tens to several tens of neutron-star binaries can measure the neutron-star radius with an accuracy of several to a few percent, for mass and spatial distributions that are realistic, and with none of the sources located within 100 Mpc. We achieve such an accuracy by combining measurements of the total mass from the inspiral phase with those of the compactness from the postmerger oscillation frequencies. For estimating the measurement errors of these frequencies, we utilize analytical fits to postmerger numerical relativity waveforms in the time domain, obtained here for the first time, for four nuclear-physics equations of state and a couple of values for the mass. We further exploit quasiuniversal relations to derive errors in compactness from those frequencies. Measuring the average radius to well within 10% is possible for a sample of 100 binaries distributed uniformly in volume between 100 and 300 Mpc, so long as the equation of state is not too soft or the binaries are not too heavy. We also give error estimates for the Einstein Telescope.
RESUMEN
The Amaldi 10 Parallel Session C2 on gravitational wave (GW) search results, data analysis and parameter estimation included three lively sessions of lectures by 13 presenters, and 34 posters. The talks and posters covered a huge range of material, including results and analysis techniques for ground-based GW detectors, targeting anticipated signals from different astrophysical sources: compact binary inspiral, merger and ringdown; GW bursts from intermediate mass binary black hole mergers, cosmic string cusps, core-collapse supernovae, and other unmodeled sources; continuous waves from spinning neutron stars; and a stochastic GW background. There was considerable emphasis on Bayesian techniques for estimating the parameters of coalescing compact binary systems from the gravitational waveforms extracted from the data from the advanced detector network. This included methods to distinguish deviations of the signals from what is expected in the context of General Relativity.