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Gravitational waves provide a unique tool for observational astronomy. While the first LIGO–Virgo catalogue of gravitational wave transients (GWTC-1) contains 11 signals from black hole and neutron star binaries, the number of observations is increasing rapidly as detector sensitivity improves. To extract information from the observed signals, it is imperative to have fast, flexible, and scalable inference techniques. In a previous paper, we introduced BILBY: a modular and user-friendly Bayesian inference library adapted to address the needs of gravitational-wave inference. In this work, we demonstrate that BILBY produces reliable results for simulated gravitational-wave signals from compact binary mergers, and verify that it accurately reproduces results reported for the 11 GWTC-1 signals. Additionally, we provide configuration and output files for all analyses to allow for easy reproduction, modification, and future use. This work establishes that BILBY is primed and ready to analyse the rapidly growing population of compact binary coalescence gravitational-wave signals. 

ABSTRACT Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Advanced Virgo have recently published the upper limit measurement of persistent directional stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) based on data from their first and second observing runs. In this paper, we investigate whether a correlation exists between this maximal likelihood SGWB map and the electromagnetic (EM) tracers of matter structure in the Universe, such as galaxy number counts. The method we develop will improve the sensitivity of future searches for anisotropy in the SGWB and expand the use of SGWB anisotropy to probe the formation of structure in the Universe. In order to compute the cross-correlation, we used the spherical harmonic decomposition of SGWB in multiple frequency bands and converted them into pixel-based sky maps in healpix basis. For the EM part, we use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey alaxy catalogue and form healpix sky maps of galaxy number counts at the same angular resolution as the SGWB maps. We compute the pixel-based coherence between these SGWB and galaxy count maps. After evaluating our results in different SGWB frequency bands and in different galaxy redshift bins, we conclude that the coherence between the SGWB and galaxy number count maps is dominated by the null measurement noise in the SGWB maps, and therefore not statistically significant. We expect the results of this analysis to be significantly improved by using the more sensitive upcoming SGWB measurements based on the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo.