Gravitational Wave Event Analyzer

A skill for fetching and analyzing real gravitational wave events from LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA using public GWOSC data.

What This Skill Does

1. Catalog Query — Fetch events from GWTC (Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog) via GWOSC API
2. Strain Download — Pull real detector strain timeseries data for any event
3. Signal Processing — Whiten, bandpass filter, and Q-transform the strain
4. Merger Classification — Classify event type: BBH (binary black hole), BNS (binary neutron star), or NSBH
5. Visualization — Generate spectrograms, waveform plots, and summary figures

Usage

Analyze a specific event

from gw_analyzer import GWEventAnalyzer

analyzer = GWEventAnalyzer()
result = analyzer.analyze_event("GW150914")
result.plot()
result.summary()

List recent events

events = analyzer.list_events(catalog="GWTC-3", min_far=1e-3)

Full pipeline

python gw_analyzer.py --event GW150914 --detector H1 --output ./output/
python gw_analyzer.py --event GW231123_135430 --detector L1 --output ./output/
python gw_analyzer.py --list-events --catalog GWTC-3 --top 10

Key Events to Try

| Event | Type | Description | |-------|------|-------------| | GW150914 | BBH | First detection ever (2015) | | GW170817 | BNS | First neutron star merger (multi-messenger) | | GW200105 | NSBH | First neutron star–black hole merger | | GW231123_135430 | BBH | Most massive merger ever detected |

Output

• {event}_waveform.png — Raw + whitened + filtered strain timeseries
• {event}_qtransform.png — Time-frequency Q-transform (chirp signature)
• {event}_summary.json — Event parameters, classification, SNR estimate
• {event}_report.txt — Human-readable analysis report

Data Source

All data fetched from GWOSC — publicly released under CC BY 4.0. Catalog: GWTC (Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog), updated through O4a run.

Dependencies

gwpy>=3.0.0
gwosc>=0.7.0
numpy>=1.24.0
scipy>=1.10.0
matplotlib>=3.7.0
astropy>=5.3.0