Gravitational Waves

Gravitational waves on TerraPulse are organized into the gw Eventdex — one slot per confirmed event. When two black holes or neutron stars spiral together and merge, they shake spacetime itself; the passing ripple stretches a four-kilometer detector by less than the width of a proton. Each slot is a merger that was actually measured. No estimates, no forecasts.

The dexes

Provenance

Every event traces to the Gravitational-Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC), the public archive of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA detector network — the interferometers in Louisiana, Washington, Italy, and Japan. An event enters the catalog only once the collaboration confirms a real astrophysical signal was seen coincidentally across the network. Those confirmed events are the slots in this dex.

What’s in a record

Each event slot carries:

• Time — the merger time, UTC
• Source masses — the masses of the two merging objects, in solar masses
• Final mass — the mass of the remnant that formed
• Distance — the luminosity distance to the source
• Network signal-to-noise — how strongly the signal stood above the noise
• Source type — binary black hole, binary neutron star, or mixed