Enabling high confidence detections of gravitational-wave bursts

Understand

With the advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors taking observations the detection of gravitational waves is expected within the next few years.

• Extracting astrophysical information from gravitational wave detections is a well-posed problem and thoroughly studied when detailed models for the waveforms are available.
• However, one motivation for the field of gravitational wave astronomy is the potential for new discoveries.
• Recognizing and characterizing unanticipated signals requires data analysis techniques which do not depend on theoretical predictions for the gravitational waveform.