GW170817
Sign in to saveGW170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating within the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993, about 140 million light years away. The wave was produced by the last moments of the inspiral of a binary pair of neutron stars, ending with their merger. It is the first GW detection to be definitively correlated with any electromagnetic observation.
Key facts
- Astronomical event.epoch
- J2000.0
- Astronomical event.distance
- 144 million ly
- Astronomical event.detected_by
- LIGO, Virgo
- Astronomical event.event_type
- Gravitational wave
- Astronomical event.name
- GW170817
- Astronomical event.redshift
- 0.0099
- Astronomical event.host
- NGC 4993
- Astronomical event.discovery
- 144 million years ago (detected 17 August 2017, 12:41:04.4 UTC)
- Astronomical event.duration
- 1 minute and 40 seconds
- Astronomical event.progenitor
- 2 neutron stars
via Wikipedia infobox
Described at
This page has been prepared by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration. The event was observed by data from the LIGO Hanford (H1), LIGO Livingston (L1) and Virgo (V1) detectors. Because the Binary Neutron Star signal spends much more than 32 seconds in the detector's frequency band, data products of 32 seconds in duration are not being distributed with GW170817. This page serves as a supplement to the paper GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral , available from LIGO DCC and doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101 . Companion papers are also available. This dataset has DOI doi:10.7935/K5B8566F . The GW170817 science summary gives an overview of the event. The one page factsheet lists statistics. Parameter estimation samples - see results from two publications: P1800115 P1800061 The technical details page describes details of the data set. Contact us with any questions. Data usage notes: Please Read This First! The data are provided in three formats. HDF5 , Frame (.gwf) , and gzipped ascii text. Many data analysis environments can read in data from HDF5 files, including Python (see the h5py package), MATLAB, C/C++, and IDL. Virgo data are noisier at frequencies above 2 kHz (See note on technical details page ) Tutorials provide an introduction to strain data. Software libraries are available for data analysis. After data collection, several independently-measured terrestrial contributions to the detector noise were subtracted from the LIGO data using Wiener filtering. This subtraction removed calibration lines and 60 Hz AC power mains harmonics from both LIGO data streams. At times near GW170817, the sensitivity of LIGO-Hanford was particularly improved by the subtraction of laser pointing noise; several broad peaks in the 150 - 800 Hz region were effectively removed, increasing the Binary Neutron Star horizon distance of that detector by 26%. In addition, a short instrumental noise transient appeared in the LIGO-Livingston detector 1.1 s before the coalescence time of GW170817. This transient noise, or glitch, produced a very brief (less than 5ms) saturation in a digital-to-analog converter. This glitch has been removed from the noise subtracted data. For reference: Below are links to strain h(t) time series centered at GPS 1187008064. All cleaned data files have been shortened to a total duration of 2048 seconds. The H1 and L1 noise subtraction procedure introduces excess noise at frequencies below 20 Hz. Users should restrict analysis to frequencies above 20 Hz. The H1 cleaned data include times corrupted by a window function used as part of the cleaning procedure. This impacts roughly the last 150 seconds of the H1 cleaned data. Due to V1's smaller coupling factor to gravitational waves from the sky direction of GW170817, and the lower detector sensitivity, the signal is below the noise level and is thus not visible in the Virgo data. These LIGO and Virgo data were used to produce parameter estimation results in the papers: arxiv:1805.11579 and arxiv:1805.11581 These LIGO data were used to produce parameter estimation results in the paper Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 161101 2048 seconds (event signal reaches peak amplitude 1842.43 seconds ± 30 msec from start†) hdf5 gwf txt.gz hdf5 gwf txt.gz hdf5 gwf txt.gz 2048 seconds (event signal reaches peak amplitude 1842.43 seconds ± 30 msec from start†) hdf5 gwf txt.gz hdf5 gwf txt.gz hdf5 gwf txt.gz Below are links to strain h(t) time series centered at GPS 1187008882. These Virgo data were used to produce parameter estimation results in the paper Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 161101 md5 checksums may be used to ensure files are correctly downloaded (the md5 checksums for the G1 files may be found here ). In GEO600 , the signal is below the noise level because of the lower detector sensitivity and is thus not visible in the G1 data. These data have not been used for the discovery of the GW170817 event and the subsequen
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- kilonova
- Follows
- GW170814
- Location
- NGC 4993
- Constellation
- Hydra
- Distance from Earth
- 40.7
- Mass
- 2.73
- Image
- GW170817 spectrograms.svg
Show 9 more facts
- redshift
- 0.0099
- catalog code
- GW170817
- described at URL
- losc.ligo.org/events/GW170817
- epoch
- J2000.0
- right ascension
- 48.085
- declination
- 53.343
- time of discovery or invention
- 2017-08-17
- site of astronomical discovery
- Virgo
- Commons category
- GW170817
via Wikidata · CC0
~19 min read
Encyclopedic overview
12 sectionsContents
- Announcement
- Gravitational wave detection
- Gamma ray detection
- Electromagnetic follow-up
- Other detectors
- Astrophysical origin and products
- Scientific importance
- Retrospective comparisons
- See also
- Notes
- References
- External links
GW170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating within the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993, about 140 million light years away. The wave was produced by the last moments of the inspiral of a binary pair of neutron stars, ending with their merger. It is the first GW detection to be definitively correlated with any electromagnetic observation.
Unlike the five prior GW detections—which were of merging black holes and thus not expected to have detectable electromagnetic signals—the aftermath of this merger was seen across the electromagnetic spectrum by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “GW170817” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.