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GWTC-4.0: Methods for Identifying and Characterizing Gravitational-wave Transients
A. G. Abac et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1004 .
Caption: Figure 1.
A high-level rendering of the flow of data from the strain and auxiliary data, denoted d(t) + , to the production of GWTC-4.0 described in this work. In this work, we use the terms downstream and upstream to refer to the flow of information in the analysis process (e.g., the parameter estimation is downstream of the compilation of search results since it depends on their outputs). This complex process enables the use of the most complete set of information for the final results while also leveraging preliminary studies to parallelize and reduce the overall analysis time. The term online (also referred to as low-latency in the literature) refers to analyses run on live data with a goal to upload candidates to GRACEDB immediately and enable rapid public alerts, while offline refers to analyses run with the goal to identify candidates for the GWTC. In each box, we provide references to the sections of this paper where the methods are explained in more detail.
© 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.