摘要: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.
关键词:gravitational waves;stars: neutron;stars: black holes;methods: numerical