Dense matter and gravitational waves: neutron stars in coalescing binaries

Jocelyn Read (California State University, Fullerton)

March 10, 2014

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Abstract: Many of the gravitational-wave sources that Advanced LIGO expects to observe are produced by the inspiral and merger of a neutron-star binary system. Measuring these signals will allow us to learn about the mass and other properties of the neutron stars, and the details of these signals can also tell us something about the dense matter that makes up neutron stars: the size and properties of a neutron star determines how it responds to its companions. I will discuss how we predict the response of a neutron star in a binary system, how gravitational-wave models that include this response are being improved, and how we predict when the signatures of matter will be observable in ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.