Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

Keywords

gravitational waves, data analysis, gravitational wave detectors

Abstract

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have cataloged eleven confidently detected gravitational-wave events during the first two observing runs of the advanced detector era. All eleven events were consistent with being from well-modeled mergers between compact stellarmass objects: black holes or neutron stars. The data around the time of each of these events have been made publicly available through the gravitationalwave open science center. The entirety of the gravitational-wave strain data from the first and second observing runs have also now been made publicly available. There is considerable interest among the broad scientific community in understanding the data and methods used in the analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of the detector noise properties and the data analysis techniques used to detect gravitational-wave signals and infer the source properties. We describe some of the checks that are performed to validate the analyses and results from the observations of gravitational-wave events. We also address concerns that have been raised about various properties of LIGO–Virgo detector noise and the correctness of our analyses as applied to the resulting data.

Journal Title

Classical and Quantum Gravity

Volume

37

Issue

055002

DOI

https://doi.org/http://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/ab685e

First Department

Physics

Acknowledgements

Retrieved 8/19/2020 from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ab685e

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