Reproducing GW150914: the first observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger

Abstract

In 2016, LIGO and Virgo announced the first observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, known as GW150914. To establish the confidence of this detection, large-scale scientific workflows were used to measure the event's statistical significance. They used code written by the LIGO/Virgo and were executed on the LIGO Data Grid. The codes are publicly available, but there has not yet been an attempt to directly reproduce the results, although several analyses have replicated the analysis, confirming the detection. We attempt to reproduce the result presented in the GW150914 discovery paper using publicly available code on the Open Science Grid. We show that we can reproduce the main result but we cannot exactly reproduce the LIGO analysis as the original data set used is not public. We discuss the challenges we encountered and make recommendations for scientists who wish to make their work reproducible.

arXiv comment11 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, 1 listing. Revised version accepted by IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering. Code available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4085984 and data available from http://dx.doi.org/10.21227/c634-qh33

References in corpus (6)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• The PyCBC search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence
• GW150914: First results from the search for binary black hole coalescence with Advanced LIGO
• The LIGO Open Science Center
• 1-OGC: The first open gravitational-wave catalog of binary mergers from analysis of public Advanced LIGO data
• A New Search Pipeline for Compact Binary Mergers: Results for Binary Black Holes in the First Observing Run of Advanced LIGO

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• Two-body problem in curved spacetime: exploring gravitational wave transient cases