Abstract & Overview
We present the results from three gravitational-wave searches for coalescing compact binaries with component masses above 1 M ⊙ during the first and second observing runs of the advanced gravitational-wave detector network. During the first observing run ( O 1 ), from September 12, 2015 to January 19, 2016, gravitational waves from three binary black hole mergers were detected. The second observing run ( O 2 ), which ran from November 30, 2016 to August 25, 2017, saw the first detection of gravitational waves from a binary neutron star inspiral, in addition to the observation of gravitational waves from a total of seven binary black hole mergers, four of which we report here for the first time: GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823. For all significant gravitational-wave events, we provide estimates of the source properties. The detected binary black holes have total masses between 18.6 − 0.7 + 3.2 M ⊙ and 84.4 − 11.1 + 15.8 M ⊙ and range in distance between 320 − 110 + 120 and 2840 − 1360 + 1400 Mpc . No neutron star–black hole mergers were detected. In addition to highly significant gravitational-wave events, we also provide a list of marginal event candidates with an estimated false-alarm rate less than 1 per 30 days. From these results over the first two observing runs, which include approximately one gravitational-wave detection per 15 days of data searched, we infer merger rates at the 90% confidence intervals of 110 − 3840 Gpc − 3 y − 1 for binary neutron stars and 9.7 − 101 Gpc − 3 y − 1 for binary black holes assuming fixed population distributions and determine a neutron star–black hole merger rate 90% upper limit of 610 Gpc − 3 y − 1 . Published by the American Physical Society 2019