Search for Eccentric Binary Neutron Star Mergers in the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO
Alexander H. Nitz1,2, Amber Lenon3, Duncan A. Brown4
1. Albert-Einstein-Institut, Max-Planck-Institut for Gravitationsphysik, D-30167 Hannover, Germany
2. Leibniz Universitat Hannover, D-30167 Hannover, Germany
3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, Morgantown WV 26506, USA
4. Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA
We present a search for gravitational waves from merging binary neutron stars which have non-negligible eccentricity as they enter the LIGO observing band. We use the public Advanced LIGO data which covers the period from 2015 through 2017 and contains
The catalog is stored in the file '1-ECCBNS.hdf'. There are a variety of tools to access hdf files from numerous computing languages. Here we will focus on access through python and h5py.
Details of the analysis are available in this preprint paper and the configuration files needed to create the analysis workflows are provided in the workflow/configuration directory.
import h5py
catalog = h5py.File('./1-ECCBNS.hdf', 'r')
# Accessing a column by name
ranking_values = catalog['stat'][:]
The file constains a set of named columns. Some of these columns give information specific to either the
LIGO Hanford or Livingston detectors. Where this is the case, the name of the column is prefixed with either a H1
or L1
.
Key | Description |
---|---|
name | The designation of the candidate event. This is of the form 150812+12:23:04UTC. |
far | The rate of false alarms with a ranking statistic as large or larger than this event. The unit is yr^-1. |
stat | The value of the ranking statistic for this candidate event. |
mass1 | The component mass of one compact object in the template waveform which found this candidate. Units in detector frame solar masses. |
mass2 | The component mass of the template waveform which found this candidate. Units in detector frame solar masses. |
eccentricity | The eccentricity parameter of the binary merger |
{H1/L1}_end_time | The time in GPS seconds when a fiducial point in the signal passes throught the detector. Typically this is near the time of merger. |
{H1/L1}_snr | The amplitude of the complex matched filter signal-to-noise observed. |
{H1/L1}_coa_phase | The phase (angle) of the complex matched filter signal-to-noise observed. |
{H1/L1}_reduced_chisq | Value of the signal consistency test defined in this paper. This is not calculated for all candidate events. In this case a value of 0 is substituted. |
{H1/L1}_sigmasq | The integral of the template waveform divided by the power spectral density. |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
We encourage use of these data in derivative works. If you use the material provided here, please cite the paper using the reference:
@article{,
key = "1770186",
author = "Nitz, Alexander H. and Lenon, Amber and Brown, Duncan A.",
title = "{Search for Eccentric Binary Neutron Star Mergers in the
first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO}",
year = "2019",
eprint = "1912.05464",
archivePrefix = "arXiv",
primaryClass = "astro-ph.HE",
SLACcitation = "%%CITATION = ARXIV:1912.05464;%%"
}
We thank Nico Yunes and Blake Moore for their feedback and guidance using TaylorF2e. DAB thanks National Science Foundation Grant No.~PHY-1707954 for support. AL thanks The Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology at West Virginia University, and the Division of Diversity Equity and Inclusion at West Virginia University for support. We acknowledge the Max Planck Gesellschaft for support and the Atlas cluster computing team at AEI Hannover. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.~PHY-1748958. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (https://www.gw-openscience.org), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Virgo is funded by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale della Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by Polish and Hungarian institutes.