An Einstein@home search for continuous gravitational waves from Cassiopeia A

Understand

We report the results of a directed search for continuous gravitational-wave emission in a broad frequency range (between 50 and 1000 Hz) from the central compact object of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A).

• The data comes from the sixth science run of LIGO and the search is performed on the volunteer distributed computing network Einstein@Home.
• We find no significant signal candidate, and set the most constraining upper limits to date on the gravitational-wave emission from Cas A, which beat the indirect age-based upper limit across the entire search range.
• At around 170 Hz (the most sensitive frequency range), we set 90% confidence upper limits on the gravitational wave amplitude $h_0$ of $\sim\!\!~2.9\times 10^{-25}$, roughly twice as constraining as the upper limits from previous searches on Cas A.