When to Point Your Telescopes: Gravitational Wave Trigger Classification for Real-Time Multi-Messenger Followup Observations

Understand

We develop a robust and self-consistent framework to extract and classify gravitational wave candidates from noisy data, for the purpose of assisting in real-time multi-messenger follow-ups during LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fourth observing run~(O4).

• Our formalism implements several improvements to the low latency calculation of the probability of astrophysical origin~(\PASTRO{}), so as to correctly account for various factors such as the sensitivity change between observing runs, and the deviation of the recovered template waveform from the true gravitational wave signal that can strongly bias said calculation.
• We demonstrate the high accuracy with which our new formalism recovers and classifies gravitational wave triggers, by analyzing replay data from previous observing runs injected with simulated sources of different categories.
• We show that these improvements enable the correct identification of the majority of simulated sources, many of which would have otherwise been misclassified.