Bayesian Reconstructions of Gravitational-wave Bursts

With several gravitational-wave detections by Advanced LIGO, we are now firmly in the era of gravitational-wave astronomy. So far all of the detected signals have been from coalescing compact objects, namely neutron stars or black holes. These are systems that have been studied in depth, and can be analyzed using general relativity based waveform models. A complementary approach to this is to search for and reconstruct gravitational waves with little to no assumptions on the source of the signal. Unmodeled analyses have the advantage of being able to capture to a wider variety of gravitational-wave sources, though with the disadvantage of being less sensitive than the modeled searches to quieter signals. In this talk I will present a method of reconstructing gravitational-wave bursts using a wavelet decomposition and Bayesian inference, and further discuss how we can use these reconstructions to characterize the signal.