LIGO AND VIRGO RELEASE AN EXTENDED CATALOG OF BINARY MERGERS

Parameters inferred from the signal for the 8 new significant event candidates in this catalog. From left to right, the figure shows the primary mass m1 and secondary mass m2 (each in units of the solar mass), the mass ratio q, the effective inspiral spin χeff and the luminosity distance DL (in Gigaparsec). The vertical width of each colored region is proportional to the probability that the parameter has the corresponding value on the horizontal axis. [Image credit: LIGO/Virgo]

2 Aug 2021 — In a new paper submitted to the arXiv, we present an updated catalog of gravitational-wave candidates from data gathered by the LIGO and Virgo detectors during the first half of their third observing run. This update, called GWTC-2.1 (Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog 2.1), corresponds to the same observing period as GWTC-2, but includes more than 1000 candidate events with a lower statistical significance. While most of these new candidates are likely to be noise, astronomers can use this updated catalog and data from telescopes to try to identify potential multi-messenger events. The science summary for this paper is also available here.