2-OGC: Open Gravitational-wave Catalog of Binary Mergers from Analysis of Public Advanced LIGO and Virgo Data

By Alexander H. Nitz, T. Dent, G. S. Davies, Sumit Kumar, C. Capano, Ian Harry, S. Mozzon, L. Nuttall, Andrew P. Lundgren, M. T'apai. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

228 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC) of compact-binary coalescences, obtained from the complete set of public data from Advanced LIGO’s first and second observing runs. For the first time we also search public data from the Virgo observatory. The sensitivity of our search benefits from updated methods of ranking candidate events including the effects of nonstationary detector noise and varying network sensitivity; in a separate targeted binary black hole merger search we also impose a prior distribution of binary component masses. We identify a population of 14 binary black hole merger events with probability of astrophysical origin >0.5 as well as the binary neutron star merger GW170817. We confirm the previously reported events GW170121, GW170304, and GW170727 and also report GW151205, a new marginal binary black hole merger with a primary mass of that may have formed through hierarchical merger. We find no additional significant binary neutron star merger or neutron star–black hole merger events. To enable deeper follow-up as our understanding of the underlying populations evolves, we make available our comprehensive catalog of events, including the subthreshold population of candidates and posterior samples from parameter inference of the 30 most significant binary black hole candidates.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fe521e9b5236b588fc343784d3dcac6a70bfe01

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Citations in the corpus

GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “The primary component of GW231123 has one of the highest confidently measured BH spins observed through GWs (evidence for highly spinning BHs has also been presented in Han-nam et al. 2022; Nitz et al. 2020; Abbott et al. 2024a, 2023a; Wadekar et al. 2023; Williams 2025).”
4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, methodology): “We limit our assignment of astro to the single-detector analyses using the method of Nitz et al. (2020) and multidetector candidates from the focused BBH region, where the vast majority of observations are found.”
Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate (2020, background): “GW151205 has also been proposed to have one component with an inferred mass of = - +M M68BH 17 28 (Nitz et al. 2020).”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “A focused search for BBH coalescences [27] is also used here, denoted later as PyCBC BBH.”