I recently downloaded the csv file for the Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog (GWTC), and after performing a bit of data cleaning I found a couple of issues that caught my attention and I thought would be worth sharing:
- This one is a minor detail, but the information panel at the top of the page on the website says “The online GWTC contains confidently-detected events from multiple data releases”, yet I noticed a few auxiliary and marginal detections made it to the dataset. These are for GW190424_180648, GW190426_152155, and GW190909_114149 respectively.
- The first 11 detection events (all from the GWTC-1-confident release) have missing data for the total mass. After doing some digging around, I found this paper from the GWTC-2.1 release which says [in the abstract] that they have “updated source properties for all binary black hole events previously reported in GWTC-1.” The paper includes the previously missing data, and the csv file should have also probably been updated but it seems like it hasn’t yet.
- Missing columns for final spin and sky area. These values can be found in the individual data files for each event, but they didn’t make it to the GWTC csv file, and it would probably be useful to have them included.
So I went ahead and created a cleaned version of the GWTC csv file with the updated parameters and additional data for final spin and sky area. The original and cleaned versions can be found in this GitHub repository I made for easy access.
I hope this is helpful, especially for anyone wanting to do some exploratory analysis on the entire population of detections so far. Maybe something interesting could be found, and I thought having the most up-to-date numbers in a clean format would be beneficial.
Cheers,
Alex