A Deep Learning-Based Methodology for Detecting and Visualizing Continuous Gravitational Waves

Abstract

Since the Gravitational Waves’ initial direct detection, a veil of mystery from the Universe has been lifted, ushering a new era of intriguing physics, as-tronomy, and astrophysics research. Unfortunately, since then, not much progress has been reported, because so far all of the detected Gravitational Waves fell only into the Binary bursting wave type (B-GWs), which are cre-ated via spinning binary compact objects such as black holes. Nowadays, as-tronomy scientists seek to detect a new type of gravitational waves called: Continuous Gravitational Waves (C-GWs). Unlike the complicated burst na-ture of B-GWs, C-GWs have elegant and much simpler form, being able to provide higher quality of information for the Universe exploration. Never-theless, C-GWs are much weaker comparing to the B-GWs, which makes them considerably harder to be detected. For this task, we propose a novel Deep-Learning-based methodology, being sensitive enough for detecting and visualizing C-GWs, based on Short-Time-Fourier data provided by LIGO. Based on extensive experimental simulations, our approach significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches, for every applied experimental configuration, revealing the efficiency of the proposed methodology. Our expectation is that this work can potentially assist scientists to improve their detection sensitivity, leading to new Astrophysical discoveries, via the incor-poration of Data-Mining and Deep-Learning sciences.