Which ASD to use in Challenge

Open Data Workshop
1

Dear all,

We are working on the ODW challenge especially exercise 4.

The data to use is taken from O2. However, by default bilby uses the ASD from O4. According to our colleagues, this could make a significant difference.

AFAWU, there are 2 ways to specify which ASD to use in bilby: either specify a text file containing the ASD (from bilby) either pass an array containing an estimate of the ASD.

So we have 3 questions:

  1. Given that the SNRs are rather high, do you think it’s useful to specify O2 ASD rather than O4 ?
  2. Given that we estimated the PSD from the timeseries containing events and glitches, do you think it would give a poor estimate ?
  3. If we were to use a file, which contains O2 ASD ?

Thanks in advance,

2

@mdubois

Thank you for your question. I am sorry for the slow response. In general, it is important to use an ASD that matches the data you have. For the data challenge, I recommend using the provided data files to estimate the ASD. Glitches and signals are generally very short lived, so they typically don’t corrupt the ASD. Using the “median” averaging method in calculating the ASD can make it more robust to glitches and signals, as well.