Citation:
Abbott, BP., et al., (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). Observing gravitational-wave transient GW150914 with minimal assumptions. Physical Review D, 93(12), 122004 (2016)
Abstract:
The gravitational-wave signal GW150914 was first identified on September 14, 2015, by searches for
short-duration gravitational-wave transients. These searches identify time-correlated transients in multiple
detectors with minimal assumptions about the signal morphology, allowing them to be sensitive to
gravitational waves emitted by a wide range of sources including binary black hole mergers. Over the
observational period from September 12 to October 20, 2015, these transient searches were sensitive to
binary black hole mergers similar to GW150914 to an average distance of ∼600 Mpc. In this paper, we
describe the analyses that first detected GW150914 as well as the parameter estimation and waveform
reconstruction techniques that initially identified GW150914 as the merger of two black holes. We find that
the reconstructed waveform is consistent with the signal from a binary black hole merger with a chirp mass
of ∼30 M⊙ and a total mass before merger of ∼70 M⊙ in the detector frame.
