In my review of the LIGO website and data, the LIGO claims that they get a gravitational wave even about once a week. The catalog of events that I have accessed does not nearly so many events and I have not found any events listed for 2024. Am I looking in the wrong place? Are events not posted in a timely manner or do we have to wait for a publication of a paper for these events to be published. In short, I’m looking for the site where I can look to see the most recent events that have been measured. I would like to check such a site once a week to see what is happening. Is that even possible?
@medicrene What a great question!
Short answer: They are on gracedb.ligo.org:
https://gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/public/O4/
In general, events are released in two different ways:
- Low-latency events are published within a few minutes on gracedb, and also shared with the astronomical community via GCN circulars and notices. These low-latency events are the results of an automated analysis, which is considered preliminary. In general, only a limited amount of information is available with these alerts. Details are available in the Public Alerts Guide.
- Final analysis of events are published in journal articles. They only show up on the GWOSC Event Portal at the time of publication.
The other important detail is that the instruments are not always operating. You can see more about the timing of when the instruments are operating below. Notice we are just ending a “commissioning break”, so there have been no events for the past couple months.
Stats:
https://gwosc.org/detector_status/
Plan: