The Gravitational Wave Universe Toolbox

A software package to simulate observations of the gravitational wave universe with different detectors^*,**

¹ Department of Astrophysics/IMAPP, Radboud University, PO Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
e-mail: sxyi@ihep.ac.cn
² SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Sorbonnelaan 2, 3584 CA Utrecht, The Netherlands
³ Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
⁴ Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
⁵ Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19B Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, PR China

Received: 25 June 2021
Accepted: 29 March 2022

Abstract

Context. As the importance of gravitational wave (GW) astrophysics increases rapidly, astronomers interested in GWs who are not experts in this field sometimes need to get a quick idea of what GW sources can be detected by certain detectors, and the accuracy of the measured parameters.

Aims. The GW-Toolbox is a set of easy-to-use, flexible tools to simulate observations of the GW universe with different detectors, including ground-based interferometers (advanced LIGO, advanced VIRGO, KAGRA, Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer, and also customised interferometers), space-borne interferometers (LISA and a customised design), and pulsar timing arrays mimicking the current working arrays (EPTA, PPTA, NANOGrav, IPTA) and future ones. We include a broad range of sources, such as mergers of stellar-mass compact objects, namely black holes, neutron stars, and black hole–neutron star binaries, supermassive black hole binary mergers and inspirals, Galactic double white dwarfs in ultra-compact orbit, extreme-mass-ratio inspirals, and stochastic GW backgrounds.

Methods. We collected methods to simulate source populations and determine their detectability with various detectors. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive description of the methodology and functionality of the GW-Toolbox.

Results. The GW-Toolbox produces results that are consistent with previous findings in the literature, and the tools can be accessed via a website interface or as a Python package. In the future, this package will be upgraded with more functions.