12 October 2016 — Gravity Spy, a crowdsourcing tool for finding and analyzing glitches in LIGO data, has been publicly launched today. Glitches, or noise, in the LIGO data are a byproduct of very high sensitivity of LIGO instruments. The presence of these non-gravitational-wave disturbances in the data can obscure or mimic true gravitational-wave signals. The origin of some glitches is well-understood, while others remain a mystery. The rates at which the glitches occur vary depending on what’s going on with the detectors and their environments. At their highest rates, glitches happen at 3x/sec. At such rates and with more than 2 dozen types of glitches observed so far, it takes an enourmous amount of data processing to sort out and classify them. To facilitate this process, the Gravity Spy tool is crowdsourcing the glitch identification to citizen scientists. With each new classification, LIGO will move closer and closer to discovering new gravitational-wave signals by identifying possible noise patterns in its data and filtering them out. Read more, and sign up, at the Gravity Spy website.
The Gravity Spy tool is a result of collaborative efforts of several LSC groups. The Gravity Spy team consists of LIGO researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astronomy (CIERA) at Northwestern University, LIGO researchers at Caltech, machine learning researchers at Northwestern University, crowd-sourced science researchers at Syracuse University, and Zooniverse web developers.