The first informative astrophysical calibration of gravitational-wave detectors is reported using GW240925 and GW250207.
hub Canonical reference
GWTC-4.0: Tests of General Relativity. I. Overview and General Tests
Canonical reference. 78% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
33
Pith papers citing it
Background
78% of classified citations
abstract
The worldwide LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network of gravitational-wave (GW) detectors continues to increase in sensitivity, thus increasing the quantity and quality of the detected GW signals from compact binary coalescences. These signals allow us to perform ever-more sensitive tests of general relativity (GR) in the dynamical and strong-field regime of gravity. This paper is the first of three, where we present the results of a suite of tests of GR using the binary signals included in the fourth GW Transient Catalog (GWTC-4.0), i.e., up to and including the first part of the fourth observing run of the detectors (O4a). We restrict our analysis to the 91 confident signals, henceforth called events, that were measured by at least two detectors, and have false alarm rates $\le 10^{-3} \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$. These include 42 events from O4a. This first paper presents an overview of the methods, selection of events and GR tests, and serves as a guidemap for all three papers. Here we focus on the four general tests of consistency, where we find no evidence for deviations from our models. Specifically, for all the events considered, we find consistency of the residuals with noise. The final mass and final spin as inferred from the low- and high-frequency parts of the waveform are consistent with each other. We also find no evidence for deviations from the GR predictions for the amplitudes of subdominant GW multipole moments, or for non-GR modes of polarization. We thus find that GR, without new physics beyond it, is still consistent with these GW events. The results of the two additional papers in this trio also find overall consistency with vacuum GR, with more than 90% of the events being consistent with GR at the 90% credible level. While one of the ringdown analyses finds the GR value in the tails for its combined results, this may be due in part to catalog variance.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 15
method 2
baseline 1
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 33representative citing papers
Numerical relativity simulations of black hole scattering in Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet gravity agree closely with effective-one-body analytic predictions.
GW241011 data shows consistency with Kerr black holes for both quadrupole and octupole moments and delivers the first observational bounds on spin-induced octupole deviations.
Bayesian analysis of GW230627 and GW250114 finds no deviation from GR at 4PN and 4.5PN orders, setting the first empirical baseline with 90% intervals of order O(1)-O(10).
Develops modified Teukolsky formalism for EMRIs in higher-derivative gravity and computes horizon and infinity fluxes for cubic gravity example.
A cross-correlation search of ~11,000 event pairs in GWTC-4 including sub-threshold candidates finds no lensed GW pairs above 3σ, setting an upper bound of ≤1.5/yr on the lensing rate.
An external dynamical environment forms a resonant cavity with a black hole in dCS gravity that triggers Mathieu instability in the scalar sector, producing cascading amplification of gravitational waves via a delayed secondary burst.
Gravitational electric-magnetic duality at the light ring organizes and preserves quasinormal mode isospectrality in GR and selects duality-invariant higher-derivative corrections in effective field theories.
Multiband observations of eccentric binary black holes can constrain dipole-radiation deviations from general relativity to |b| ≲ 10^{-7} for a GW231123-like event when combining one year of space-based data with ground-informed priors.
Numerical simulations of equal-mass boson-star mergers reveal larger waveform deviations from black-hole binaries in late inspiral and merger, plus odd multipole excitations for certain scalar-field phases, with some signals degenerate until IMR consistency tests are applied.
Landau coefficients for scalarization phase transitions are calculated from first principles via reduction of the theory's energy functional to an effective energy function.
The gwNRHME framework constructs a multi-modal non-spinning eccentric gravitational waveform surrogate by modulating quasi-circular models with universal eccentric functions, achieving median mismatches of ~9e-5 against 156 NR waveforms.
Polynomial models for the (2,2) post-merger waveform amplitudes of eccentric non-spinning binary black holes are constructed from numerical-relativity data as functions of symmetric mass ratio and two merger-time dynamical parameters.
GreyRing model based on greybody factors reproduces numerical relativity ringdown signals with mismatches of order 10^{-6} and enables a new post-merger consistency test of general relativity applied to GW250114.
Leading-order deviations from general relativity in scalar quasinormal modes of rotating black holes are computed numerically up to dimensionless spins of 0.99 in quadratic-curvature scalar-tensor theories.
Numerical relativity in the decoupling limit reveals dynamical scalarization and spin-induced (de)scalarization during hyperbolic black hole encounters for both signs of the coupling.
Numerical simulations of collapsing scalarized neutron stars show scalar radiation energy of order 10^{-3} solar masses, orders of magnitude above the tensor quadrupolar emission, potentially observable to test modified gravity.
Bayesian analysis finds individual QNM frequencies near avoided crossings hard to resolve even under optimistic conditions, though collective AC waveform signatures may remain detectable if those modes dominate and slower-mode contamination is minimal.
Leading-order cubic-curvature corrections to scalar quasinormal modes of black holes with spins up to 0.99M are computed numerically for modes up to l=5 with relative errors below 10^{-4}.
Bilby-antiglitch jointly models astrophysical signals and quasi-physical glitches to recover true source properties from simulated gravitational wave data contaminated by loud non-Gaussian transients.
ET-Δ outperforms ET-2L on luminosity distance and source-frame masses for BBH events because its redundancy produces higher multi-detector uptime under realistic duty-cycle modeling.
92% of 91 LIGO black hole mergers favor non-zero V_GW, constraining bound remnants to at most 8% and finding no cosmological handedness preference with average near zero.
Hierarchical Bayesian inference on GWTC-5.0 constrains the memory enhancement factor to 0.26 with large uncertainties consistent with the GR value of 1 and forecasts that 2000 detections are needed for a 1σ constraint away from zero.
Using TaylorF2 post-Newtonian waveforms truncated at ISCO, the study finds that Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer can reach SNR of 100-350 and measure primary spin to 10^{-4}-10^{-3} precision for 0.1-2 solar mass exotic compact objects.
citing papers explorer
-
VIGILant: an automatic classification pipeline for glitches in the Virgo detector
VIGILant applies tree-based models and a ResNet CNN to classify Virgo O3b glitches with 98% accuracy and has been deployed for daily use with an interactive dashboard.
-
Improved Constraints on Non-Kerr Deviations from Binary Black Hole Inspirals Using GWTC-4 Data
Bayesian constraints from GWTC-4 binary black hole inspirals show Johannsen metric deformation parameters α13 and ε3 consistent with zero, supporting the Kerr hypothesis.