Open Public Alerts

All the GW events detected so far, are so-called ‘compact binary coalescences‘, i.e. mergers of stellar-mass black holes and/or neutron stars. During the first and second observing runs  the alerts for possible signals were circulated only among partners who had signed agreements with the LIGO/Virgo collaboration.  

The Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN)   system is used by the LVK collaboration to distribute early notices, within minutes after a gravitational wave candidate is detected. In order to send out a GCN notice, the candidate must have passed automated data quality checks; whenever these checks did not result in an unambiguous detection, a small team of experts (called the Rapid Response Team) would quickly come online to perform a more accurate analysis. As a result, some of these alerts were retracted lately and claimed as false alarms.

For the continuous wave signal and continuous stochastic background [link to gw sources] the detection process is totally different, as the analysis of long data stretches, as long as the full run, is needed.