Speaker
Description
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration have so far announced about 90 detections of gravitational waves, all of them associated with mergers of compact objects at high redshifts. These signals are transient and bright, typically presenting a strain amplitude of 10-21 for most of the time. By contrast, continuous gravitational waves (CWs) - a persistent though orders of magnitude weaker train of nearly monochromatic waves - have not yet been identified in the LIGO/Virgo observing runs. A spinning, slightly deformed, neutron star is one of the most promising candidate to trigger a first detection. While coherent time searches for CWs are feasible for pulsars with a precise timing solution and known sky location, blind, all-sky searches rely on semi-coherent searching methods and the shared computing power of the Einstein@Home initiative. We present here the results of an investigation of viable X-ray counterparts of CW candidates from the Einstein@Home all-sky search in the eROSITA survey data. While the "loudest" CW emitters are expected to be young and energetic spin-powered pulsars, blind searches will put forward candidates lacking bright electromagnetic counterparts (e.g. a previously known pulsar wind nebula or supernova remnant). This opens the interesting prospect to associate CW candidates with peculiar groups of X-ray thermally-emitting isolated neutron stars: central compact objects (CCOs) in supernova remnants and X-ray dim isolated neutron stars (XDINS), which may have evolved differently than most neutron stars that are known in our Galaxy.
