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Astrophysics and Astronomy

Selected Works

Michele Zanolin

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Gw151226: Observation Of Gravitational Waves From A 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence, B. P. Abbott, K. Gill, B. Hughey, M. J. Szczepanczyk, M. Zanolin, Et Al. Nov 2017

Gw151226: Observation Of Gravitational Waves From A 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence, B. P. Abbott, K. Gill, B. Hughey, M. J. Szczepanczyk, M. Zanolin, Et Al.

Michele Zanolin

We report the observation of a gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar-mass black holes. The signal, GW151226, was observed by the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC. The signal was initially identified within 70 s by an online matched-filter search targeting binary coalescences. Subsequent off-line analyses recovered GW151226 with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 13 and a significance greater than 5 σ. The signal persisted in the LIGO frequency band for approximately 1 s, increasing in frequency and amplitude over about 55 cycles from 35 to 450 …

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Observing Gravitational-Wave Transient Gw150914 With Minimal Assumptions, B. P. Abbott, K. Gill, B. Hughey, M. Szczepańczyk, M. Zanolin, Et Al. Nov 2017

Observing Gravitational-Wave Transient Gw150914 With Minimal Assumptions, B. P. Abbott, K. Gill, B. Hughey, M. Szczepańczyk, M. Zanolin, Et Al.

Michele Zanolin

The gravitational-wave signal GW150914 was first identified on September 14, 2015, by searches for short-duration gravitational-wave transients. These searches identify time-correlated transients in multiple detectors with minimal assumptions about the signal morphology, allowing them to be sensitive to gravitational waves emitted by a wide range of sources including binary black hole mergers. Over the observational period from September 12 to October 20, 2015, these transient searches were sensitive to binary black hole mergers similar to GW150914 to an average distance of ∼600  Mpc. In this paper, we describe the analyses that first detected GW150914 as well as the parameter estimation …

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Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators' Errors To Gravitational Waves From Inspiraling Binary Systems: The Network Case, Salvatore Vitale, Michele Zanolin Nov 2011

Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators' Errors To Gravitational Waves From Inspiraling Binary Systems: The Network Case, Salvatore Vitale, Michele Zanolin

Michele Zanolin

This paper describes the most accurate analytical frequentist assessment to date of the uncertainties in the estimation of physical parameters from gravitational waves generated by nonspinning binary systems and Earth-based networks of laser interferometers. The paper quantifies how the accuracy in estimating the intrinsic parameters mostly depends on the network signal to noise ratio (SNR), but the resolution in the direction of arrival also strongly depends on the network geometry. We compare results for 6 different existing and possible global networks and two different choices of the parameter space. We show how the fraction of the sky where the one …

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Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators Errors To Gravitational Waves From Binary Mergers: The Single Interferometer Case, M. Zanolin, S. Vitale, N. Makris Jun 2010

Application Of Asymptotic Expansions For Maximum Likelihood Estimators Errors To Gravitational Waves From Binary Mergers: The Single Interferometer Case, M. Zanolin, S. Vitale, N. Makris

Michele Zanolin

In this paper we describe a new methodology to calculate analytically the error for a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) for physical parameters from gravitational wave signals. All the existing literature focuses on the usage of the Cramer Rao Lower bounds (CRLB) as a mean to approximate the errors for large signal to noise ratios. We show here how the variance and the bias of an MLE estimate can be expressed instead in inverse powers of the signal to noise ratios where the first order in the variance expansion is the CRLB. As an application we compute the second order of …

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Gravitational Wave Burst Source Direction Estimation Using Time And Amplitude Information, J. Markowitz, M. Zanolin, L. Cadonati, E. Katsavounidis Dec 2008

Gravitational Wave Burst Source Direction Estimation Using Time And Amplitude Information, J. Markowitz, M. Zanolin, L. Cadonati, E. Katsavounidis

Michele Zanolin

In this article we study two problems that arise when using timing and amplitude estimates from a network of interferometers (IFOs) to evaluate the direction of an incident gravitational wave burst (GWB). First, we discuss an angular bias in the least squares timing-based approach that becomes increasingly relevant for moderate to low signal-to-noise ratios. We show how estimates of the arrival time uncertainties in each detector can be used to correct this bias. We also introduce a stand alone parameter estimation algorithm that can improve the arrival time estimation and provide root-sum-squared strain amplitude (h(rss)) values for each site. In …

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