Criteria for the events that are listed in event portal

Data Analysis
1

Hi,

Number of (super)events that are listed in GraceDB during O3ab is significantly larger than the events that are actually listed in event portal (the reduction factor is enormous). I understand that some of the (super)events turn out not to be from astrophysical origin, or SNR is not high enough or there are other problems, but I would like to know the main criteria that gives a (super)event the privilege to be listed in event portal.

Thanks

2

Hi @Maryam ! Thank you for the question.

The main criteria for publishing an event in the Event Portal, is that the event should be published in a catalog paper.

For O3 events, most of these are either in the GWTC-2.1 or GWTC-3 catalog papers (linked below).

These papers, in turn, set thresholds on either p-astro or FAR for inclusion.

From the GWTC-3 abstract:
“There are 35 compact binary coalescence candidates identified by at least one of our search algorithms with a probability of astrophysical origin pastro>0.5. Of these”

And from the GWTC-2.1 abstract:
"We calculate the source properties of a subset of 44 high-significance candidates that have an astrophysical probability greater than 0.5. "

I’m not sure about the idea that there are a lot more events in GraceDB compared with the Event Portal. Looking at the GraceDB O3 alerts page, I see 56 events.

Looking at the set of GWTC-2.1 and GWTC-3 events in the Event Portal, I see a total of 79 events, which is a little more than the set of public alerts from O3.