The Dawes Review 12: Gravitational-wave burst astrophysics

Abstract Over a hundred gravitational-wave signals have now been detected from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars, but other sources of gravitational waves have not yet been discovered. Some of the most violent explosive events in the Universe are predicted to emit bursts of gravitational waves and may result in the next big multi-messenger discovery. Gravitational-wave burst signals often have an unknown waveform shape and unknown gravitational-wave energy, due to unknown or very complicated progenitor astrophysics. Potential sources of gravitational-wave bursts include core-collapse supernovae, cosmic strings, fast radio bursts, eccentric binary systems, and gravitational-wave memory. In this review, we discuss the astrophysical properties of the main predicted sources of gravitational-wave bursts and the known features of their gravitational-wave emission. We summarise their future detection prospects and discuss the challenges of searching for gravitational-wave burst signals and interpreting the astrophysics of the source.