GWTC-4.0: Updating the Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog with Observations from the First Part of the Fourth LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Observing Run

2025/08/25 by The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Adrian Abac, the Virgo Collaboration +3575 · 8 voices · 92 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae

paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae2c74

Abstract

Abstract Version 4.0 of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-4.0) adds new candidates detected by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories through the first part of the fourth observing run (O4a: 2023 May 24 15:00:00 to 2024 January 16 16:00:00 UTC) and a preceding engineering run. In these new data, we find 128 compact binary coalescence candidates that are identified by at least one of our search algorithms with a probability of astrophysical origin p astro ≥ 0.5 and that are not vetoed during event validation. We also provide detailed source property measurements for 86 of these that have a false-alarm rate &lt;1 yr −1 . Based on the inferred component masses, these candidates are consistent with signals from binary black holes (BBHs) and neutron star–black hole binaries (GW230518₁25908 and GW230529₁81500). Median-inferred component masses of BBHs in the catalog now range from 5.79M⊙ (GW230627₀15337) to 137 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>M</mml:mi> <mml:mo>⊙</mml:mo> </mml:msub> </mml:math> (GW231123₁35430), while GW231123₁35430 was probably produced by the most massive binary observed in the catalog. For the first time, we have discovered BBH signals with network signal-to-noise ratio exceeding 30, GW230814₂30901 and GW231226₁01520, enabling high-fidelity studies of the waveforms and astrophysical properties of these systems. Combined with the 90 candidates included in GWTC-3.0, the catalog now contains 218 candidates with p astro ≥ 0.5 and not otherwise vetoed, more than doubling the size of the catalog and further opening our view of the gravitational-wave Universe.

Citations

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
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• Next generation of accurate and efficient multipolar precessing-spin effective-one-body waveforms for binary black holes
• GWTC-4.0: An Introduction to Version 4.0 of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 <i>M</i> _⊙
• dynesty: a dynamic nested sampling package for estimating Bayesian posteriors and evidences
• Masses, Radii, and the Equation of State of Neutron Stars

Cited by

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• Coupled by Design: Computing Kerr-Newman Quasinormal Modes with a Hybrid SpectralPINN Solver
• Zipoy--Voorhees spacetime with Maxwell and dilaton fields: exact solution and equatorial geodesics
• Noise reduction in suspension control with photon-pressure actuator for CHRONOS gravitational wave detector
• Combining gravitational wave search pipelines to find subthreshold signals in GWTC-5.0
• Primordial Black Hole mass growth from neutrinos during the radiation era
• Gravitational wave echoes as probes of the maximum mass of strange stars in quadratic curvature-matter coupled gravity
• Extreme mass-ratio inspirals into Newtonian Proca stars
• The impact of physically motivated calibration errors on search pipeline detection parameters for broadband burst Signals
• Impact of eccentricity and higher-modes on neutron star-black hole parameter estimation
• Periodic line-of-sight velocity-driven modulations to gravitational waves emitted by compact binaries in Keplerian outer orbits
• Chase Orbits, Not Time: A Scalable Paradigm for Long-Duration Eccentric Gravitational-Wave Surrogates
• GW240925 and GW250207: Astrophysical calibration of gravitational wave detectors
• Primordial Black Hole Formation Beyond the Standard Cosmic QCD Transition
• GW250114: testing Hawking's area law and the Kerr nature of black holes
• GSpyNetTree-O4: an event validation tool used in the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run
• Fixing IR tail of gravitational waves from domain walls
• Sensitivity of Weak Lensing Surveys to Gravitational Waves from Inspiraling Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Detection of Lensed Gravitational Waves in the Millihertz Band Using Frequency-Domain Lensing Feature Extraction Network
• Measuring Eccentricity and Addressing Waveform Systematics in GW231123
• Six-loop gravitational interactions at the sixth post-Newtonian order
• Probing the spin of compact objects with gravitational microlensing of gravitational waves
• CoBiTS: Single-detector discrimination of binary black hole signals from glitches using deep learning
• Ghost-free 2-form fields in cosmology: implications for gravitational parity violation
• Quasinormal modes of thick branes in f(R) gravity
• Scalar damping in cosmological phase transitions
• Classification of the equation of state of neutron stars via sparse dictionary learning
• Computing spectral shifts for Johannsen-Psaltis Black Holes
• Estimation of the Hubble parameter from unedited compact object merger catalogues
• Self-lensing of moving gravitational-wave sources can break the microlensing crossing timescale degeneracy
• Inspiraling binary charged black holes in an external magnetic field: Application of post-Newtonian dynamics in Einstein-Maxwell theory
• A Model-Independent Framework for Gravitational-Wave Reconstruction of Binary Black Hole Hyperbolic Encounters in Ground-Based Interferometers
• Characterizing Binary Black Hole Subpopulations in GWTC-4 with Binned Gaussian Processes: On the Origins of the 35M_\odot Peak
• Guesswork in the gap: the impact of uncertainty in the compact binary population on source classification
• Efficient Search for Detection Candidates Using a Peak Finder Strategy for All-Sky-All-Frequency Gravitational Wave Radiometer
• All-sky search for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown neutron stars in binary systems in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run
• LISA as a probe of pre-big-bang physics: a nested sampling analysis
• Auto-encoder model for faster generation of effective one-body gravitational waveform approximations
• Probing Supernovae through gravitational wave entropy
• The impact of precession and higher-order multipoles on cosmological inference
• Constraining Black Hole Horizon Properties Through Long-Duration Gravitational Wave Observations
• SGNL: Scalable Low-Latency Gravitational Wave Detection Pipeline for Compact Binary Mergers
• Accelerated Sequential Posterior Inference via Reuse for Gravitational-Wave Analyses
• Quadrature-witness readout for backscatter mitigation in gravitational-wave detectors limited by back-action
• Gravitational radiation from hyperbolic orbits: Comparison between self-force, post-Minkowskian, post-Newtonian, and numerical relativity results
• Constraining deviations from the Teukolsky equation with GW250114
• Constraining Gravitational Wave Memory with Hierarchical Inference
• labrador: A domain-optimized machine-learning tool for gravitational wave inference
• Constraining the gravitational-wave emission of core-collapse supernovae with ground-based detectors
• A new group of low-spin 50-70M_\odot Black Holes and the high pair-instability mass cutoff
• Torque cancellation effect of Intensity noise for Cryogenic sub-Hz cROss torsion bar detector with quantum NOn-demolition Speed meter (CHRONOS)
• Optimizing searches for gravitational wave bursts using coherent WaveBurst 2G
• Probing Binary Black Hole Formation Channels through Cosmic Large-Scale Structure
• On the use of the Derivative Approximation for Likelihoods for Gravitational Wave Inference
• Assessing the Distance for Probing the Nuclear Equation of State with Supernova Gravitational Waves
• GR-Athena++ Simulations of Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers
• APRIL: Auxiliary Physically-Redundant Information in Loss - A physics-informed framework for parameter estimation with a gravitational-wave case study
• Neural Post-Einsteinian Test of General Relativity with the Third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• Hybridization of second-order gravitational self-force and numerical relativity waveforms for quasi-circular and non-spinning black hole binaries
• Black hole mergers beyond general relativity: a self-force approach
• Particles with precessing spin in Kerr spacetime: analytic solutions for eccentric orbits and homoclinic motion near the equatorial plane
• Inferring cosmological parameters from galaxy and dark sirens cross-correlation
• Explanation of the Mass Distribution of Binary Black Hole Mergers
• Good things always come in 3s: trimodality in the binary black-hole chirp-mass distribution supports bimodal black-hole formation
• Archival Inference for Eccentric Stellar-Mass Binary Black Holes in Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observations
• 3+1 GRHD simulations of NSBH mergers with light black holes using public codes
• GW250114 reveals black hole horizon signatures
• Eccentric binary black holes: A new framework for numerical relativity waveform surrogates
• Gravitational wave experiments: achievements and plans
• Spiral Density Waves and Torque Balance in the Kerr Geometry
• Toward a Theory of Gravitational Wave Turbulence
• The first decade of gravitational-wave measurements of black hole spins
• Smoking-gun evidence for hierarchical black-hole mergers
• Efficient Eccentric Effective-One-Body Dynamics via Near-Identity Averaging Transformations
• An analysis and cosmological study of the propagation of gravitational radiation under a graviton of nonzero mass
• Echoes from the dark: Galaxy catalog incompleteness in standard siren cosmology
• Observational constraints on the nonlinear regime of gravity with a parametrized beyond-GR gravitational waveform model
• Spectral instability of horizonless compact objects within astrophysical environments: The "exotic'' elephant and the flea
• Evidence for Three Subpopulations of Merging Binary Black Holes at Different Primary Masses
• Binary Black Hole Phase Space Discovers the Signature of Pair Instability Supernovae Mass Gap
• Black Hole Spectroscopy and Tests of General Relativity with GW250114
• Is GW190521 a gravitational wave echo of wormhole remnant from another universe?
• The bound orbits and gravitational waveforms of timelike particles around renormalization group improved Kerr black holes
• Directed searches for gravitational waves from ultralight vector boson clouds around merger remnant and galactic black holes during the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run
• Bright siren without electromagnetic counterpart by LISA-Taiji-TianQin network
• Spinning Black Holes in Modified Gravity via Spectral Methods
• Gravitational-wave constraints on the pair-instability mass gap and nuclear burning in massive stars
• Evidence of the pair instability gap in the distribution of black hole masses
• Towards a few percent measurement of the Hubble constant with the current network of gravitational wave detectors without using electromagnetic information
• Implications for Pulsar Timing Arrays of Sub-solar Black Hole Detections: From LVK to Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer
• Eccentricity evolution consistency test to distinguish eccentric gravitational-wave signals from eccentricity mimickers
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• Probing missing physics from inspiralling compact binaries via time-frequency tracks

Discussions

• Results from the first part of our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run are out today! We're pleased to share the largest catalog of gravitational-wave observations with more discover [bsky, 245 points, 5 comments]
• The new results we've released today contain the loudest signal we've detected so far: GW230814, louder even than the famous GW170817 neutron star merger. Read about it in the paper: arxiv.org/pdf/250 [bsky, 5 points, 1 comments]
• GWTC-4.0: Updating the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog with Observations from the First Part of the Fourth @ligo.org-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run (compiled: 26 August 2025): arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18082 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
• New results out today from LIGO (@ligo.org) - Virgo (@egovirgo.bsky.social) - KAGRA ! The latest catalogue features more than double the number of probable signals compared to the previous one! #GWTC4 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
• The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA GW data from the first big chunk of O4 is releases today. Our catalog paper is here: arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
• When Christians ask what I would consider evidence for God, I point out the studies underway to establish the existence of gravitational waves. #atheism arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• Thanks for writing about the anniversary. It looks like you missed the GWTC-4.0 results coming out? arxiv.org/abs/2508.18082 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• #gr-qc #astro-ph.HE Origin | Interest | Match [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

Related

• GWTC-2.1: Deep Extended Catalog of Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
• GWTC-4.0: An Introduction to Version 4.0 of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• 2-OGC: Open Gravitational-wave Catalog of Binary Mergers from Analysis of Public Advanced LIGO and Virgo Data