The DAWES review: Gravitational-wave burst astrophysics

TL;DR

This review discusses the astrophysical sources of gravitational-wave bursts, their emission features, detection prospects, and the challenges in identifying and interpreting these signals from various cosmic events.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of potential gravitational-wave burst sources, their expected signals, and the current challenges in detection and astrophysical interpretation.

Findings

Potential sources include supernovae, cosmic strings, and binary systems.

Detection prospects are summarized with future outlooks.

Challenges involve waveform uncertainty and source interpretation.

Abstract

Over a hundred gravitational-wave signals have now been detected from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars, but other sources of gravitational waves have not yet been discovered. Some of the most violent explosive events in the Universe are predicted to emit bursts of gravitational waves, and may result in the next big multi-messenger discovery. Gravitational-wave burst signals often have an unknown waveform shape, and unknown gravitational-wave energy, due to unknown or very complicated progenitor astrophysics. Potential sources of gravitational-wave bursts include core-collapse supernovae, cosmic strings, fast radio bursts, eccentric binary systems, and gravitational-wave memory. In this review, we discuss the astrophysical properties of the main predicted sources of gravitational-wave bursts, and the known features of their gravitational-wave emission. We summarise their future detection prospects, and discuss the challenges of searching for gravitational-wave burst signals and interpreting the astrophysics of the source.