Lately I’ve noticed I am getting a fairly steady stream of questions from a variety of people - ranging from high school students to colleagues - about how they can interact with LIGO-Virgo data themselves. This is a master post linking to the resources that I usually suggest people take a look at if they are interested in the analyses.

For any fellow LVK members, if you have resources you would like included here, please email me directly! This page is under continual development and maintenance.

Citizen Science

Gravity Spy is a citizen science project where you classify glitches in LIGO data. The work helps the detector characterization team and the rest of the collaboration to understand and mitigate glitches that interfere with GW detection. Gravity Spy is a great option for any primary or high school students, or anyone who just wants to help out with LSC science through a nice, easy to understand interface. Gravity Spy is run by Northwestern University, LIGO researchers at Caltech, crowd-sourced science researchers at Syracuse University and Zooniverse researchers.

GW Detection

The Gravitational Wave Open Science Center is your one stop shop for all things gravitational wave. They host excellent tutorials, have easy to use python notebooks you can use as well as a repository of all the LVK data products that are open access.

GWOSC is usually the first place I send my students when they start a project in our group. Their tutorials are excellent, and require a basic knowledge of the Python programming language.

GWOSC also links to public data that is accessed through the LSC document control center system. As well as providing raw strain data that can be used by other teams outside the LVK wishing to test detection pipelines, the provide processed data products that are useful for astronomers. For example, you can access the parameter estimation results, which include the skymaps for events released in the public catalogs.

They also provide access to code snippets that can be used to read the formatting of these products quickly and easily using Python.

During observing runs, information on the latest public alerts is provided through GraceDB. GraceDB lists important information from the detection pipelines and data products including skymaps and preliminary parameter estimation produced with latencies of minutes to days after detections are made. More information for astronomers interested in followup can be found in the Low Latency documentation.

There are five online detection pipelines as of the end of O3. They are GstLAL, PyCBC Live, SPIIR, MBTA (all of which are modelled searches - we look for signals whose form are known) and cWB (searching for transients we do not have a model for).

Of the modelled searches, GstLAL and SPIIR both perform time-domain searches (that is, when we do our matched filtering approximation, we match the time domain strain and the time domain template). PyCBC Live and MBTA both perform frequency-domain searches. If you require a bibtex file containing references to the latest pipeline papers please contact me - I will update this webpage soon with a downloadable bibtex file that will be maintained on a weekly basis.

You can see a public overview of some of the latest SPIIR developments via this video, presented at the 2021 ANITA conference. The first 2 minutes are missing but you get the general idea.

Software Packages

A lot of these software packages are inter-dependent. This is not an exhaustive list but a starting point for the prospective GW hunter. Want me to include your software here? Send me an email or Twitter DM:

PyCBC - simulating signals, parameter estimation, everything you could ever want for GW science

Ligo.Skymap - fantastic resource if you want to plot skymaps.

LALSuite - Some more hardcore LIGO software stuff, good for the really serious researcher

Bilby - used for parameter estimation. More user-friendly than LALInference on it’s own.

GWpy - Just really useful, I use it for things like converting GPS times

Riroriro - non-LVK but related, good for students who are working their way up to PyCBC