v1.0 of the 1-OGC Catalog of Compact Binary Merger Candidates

Introduction

This repository contains the first Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (1-OGW), which is obtained by using the public data from Advanced LIGO's first observing run to search for compact-object binary mergers. Our analysis is based on new methods that improve the separation between signals and noise in matched-filter searches for gravitational waves from the merger of compact objects.

We make available our complete catalog of events, including the sub-threshold population of candidates. The catalog contains approximately 150,000 candidate events. We note that since the vast majority of the events in the catalog are likely to be noise, we have provided information to rank and select candidate events. The three most significant signals in our catalog correspond to the binary black hole mergers GW150914, GW151226, and LVT151012, respectively. We observe these signals at a true discovery rate of 99.92%. We find that LVT151012 alone has a 97.6% probability of being astrophysical in origin. No other significant binary black hole candidates are found, nor did we observe any significant binary neutron star or neutron star--black hole candidates.

The catalog is stored in the file '1-OGC.hdf'. There are a variety of tools to access hdf files from numerous computing languages. Here we will focus on access through python and h5py.

Analysis Details

Details of the analysis are available in this preprint paper and the configuration files needed to create the analysis workflows are provided in the workflow/configuration directory.