1. Generating an inspiral range timeseries¶

One standard figure-of-merit for the sensitivity of a gravitational-wave detector is the distance to which a binary neutron star (BNS) inspiral with two 1.4 solar mass components would be detected with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 8. We can estimate this using gwpy.astro.range_timeseries() directly from the strain readout for a detector.

First, we need to load some data. We can fetch the public data around the GW170817 BNS merger:

from gwpy.timeseries import TimeSeries
h1 = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('H1', 1187006834, 1187010930, tag='C02')
l1 = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('L1', 1187006834, 1187010930, tag='C02')

Then, we can measure the inspiral range directly:

from gwpy.astro import range_timeseries
h1range = range_timeseries(h1, 30, fftlength=4, fmin=10)
l1range = range_timeseries(l1, 30, fftlength=4, fmin=10)

We can now plot these trends to see the variation in LIGO sensitivity over an hour or so surrounding GW170817:

plot = h1range.plot(
    label='LIGO-Hanford', color='gwpy:ligo-hanford', figsize=(12, 5))
ax = plot.gca()
ax.plot(l1range, label='LIGO-Livingston', color='gwpy:ligo-livingston')
ax.set_ylabel('Angle-averaged sensitive distance [Mpc]')
ax.set_title('LIGO sensitivity to BNS around GW170817')
ax.set_epoch(1187008882)  # <- set 0 on plot to GW170817
ax.legend()
plot.show()

(png)

Note, the extreme dip in LIGO-Livingston’s sensitivity near GW170817 is caused by a loud, transient noise event, see Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 119, p. 161101 for more information.