Published April 2021 | Version Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First Half of the Third Observing Run

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Abstract

We report on gravitational-wave discoveries from compact binary coalescences detected by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo in the first half of the third observing run (O3a) between 1 April 2019 15∶00 UTC and 1 October 2019 15∶00 UTC. By imposing a false-alarm-rate threshold of two per year in each of the four search pipelines that constitute our search, we present 39 candidate gravitational-wave events. At this threshold, we expect a contamination fraction of less than 10%. Of these, 26 candidate events were reported previously in near-real time through gamma-ray coordinates network notices and circulars; 13 are reported here for the first time. The catalog contains events whose sources are black hole binary mergers up to a redshift of approximately 0.8, as well as events whose components cannot be unambiguously identified as black holes or neutron stars. For the latter group, we are unable to determine the nature based on estimates of the component masses and spins from gravitational-wave data alone. The range of candidate event masses which are unambiguously identified as binary black holes (both objects ≥3  M⊙) is increased compared to GWTC-1, with total masses from approximately 14  M⊙ for GW190924_021846 to approximately 150  M⊙ for GW190521. For the first time, this catalog includes binary systems with significantly asymmetric mass ratios, which had not been observed in data taken before April 2019. We also find that 11 of the 39 events detected since April 2019 have positive effective inspiral spins under our default prior (at 90% credibility), while none exhibit negative effective inspiral spin. Given the increased sensitivity of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, the detection of 39 candidate events in approximately 26 weeks of data (approximately 1.5 per week) is consistent with GWTC-1.

Additional Information

© 2021 Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Received 30 October 2020; revised 23 February 2021; accepted 20 April 2021; published 9 June 2021. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector and the creation and support of the EGO consortium. The authors also gratefully acknowledge research support from these agencies as well as by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Department of Science and Technology, India, the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India, the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación, the Vicepresidència i Conselleria d'Innovació, Recerca i Turisme and the Conselleria d'Educació i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears, the Conselleria d'Innovació, Universitats, Ciència i Societat Digital de la Generalitat Valenciana and the CERCA Programme Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain, the National Science Centre of Poland and the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Science Foundation, the European Commission, the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), the French Lyon Institute of Origins (LIO), the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS), Actions de Recherche Concertées (ARC) and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek–Vlaanderen (FWO), Belgium, the Paris Île-de-France Region, the National Research, Development and Innovation Office Hungary (NKFIH), the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations, and Communications, the International Center for Theoretical Physics South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR), the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Leverhulme Trust, the Research Corporation, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, and the Kavli Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF, STFC, INFN, and CNRS for provision of computational resources. The detection of the signals and subsequent significance evaluations in this catalog were performed with the gstlal -based inspiral software pipeline [111,122,123] built on the lalsuite software library [295] and with the pycbc [29,124–127] and cWB [112,118–121] packages. Parameter estimation was performed with the LALInference [179] and lalsimulation libraries within lalsuite [295], the Bilby and Parallel Bilby libraries [232–234] using the dynesty nested sampling package [235], and the RIFT library [229–231]. PESummary was used to postprocess and collate parameter estimation results [237]. Estimates of the noise spectra and glitch models were obtained using BayesWave [107,108,182]. The cWB and BayesWave packages were also used to generate waveform reconstructions. Plots were prepared with matplotlib [296], seaborn [297], and gwpy [298]. numpy [299] and scipy [300] were used in the preparation of the manuscript.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
107355
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20210107-073913520

Related works

Funding

NSF
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
Max-Planck-Society
State of Niedersachsen/Germany
Australian Research Council
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM)
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (India)
Department of Science and Technology (India)
Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB)
Ministry of Human Resource Development (India)
Agencia Estatal de Investigación
Vicepresidéncia i Conselleria d'Innovació, Recerca i Turisme
Conselleria d'Educació i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears
Conselleria d'Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana
National Science Centre (Poland)
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Russian Foundation for Basic Research
Russian Science Foundation
European Commission
European Regional Development Funds (ERDF)
Royal Society
Scottish Funding Council
Scottish Universities Physics Alliance
Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA)
Lyon Institute of Origins (LIO)
Paris Île-de-France Region
National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (NKFIA)
National Research Foundation of Korea
Industry Canada
Province of Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (MCTIC)
International Center for Theoretical Physics South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR)
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Leverhulme Trust
Research Corporation
Ministry of Science and Technology (Taipei)
Kavli Foundation

Dates

Created
2021-01-13
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2022-10-28
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Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
LIGO, Astronomy Department