Autonomous system
AS14940 LIGO-HANFORD-OBSERVATORY
Unclassified ARIN
Summary
LIGO Observatory
research education infrastructure
The handle names one observatory and the registrant names the other.
What it's used for
- A gravitational wave observatory's network. 1,024 addresses in a single IPv4 prefix, with one observed BGP neighbour and no IPv6 announced.
Notable
- The AS handle is
LIGO-HANFORD-OBSERVATORYwhile the registrant on the block isLIGO Livingston Observatory. - The netname repeats the handle exactly, so two of the three fields name one site and the third names a different one.
- The whole footprint is
199.188.184.0/22. - Three addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.
Interesting
- The two names belong to the pair of detectors that make this instrument work. A gravitational wave is confirmed by seeing the same disturbance at both sites, thousands of kilometres apart, within a few thousandths of a second, so neither one means anything alone. The registry records that pairing by accident, with one site's paperwork carrying the other's name.
- Someone filing for a second observatory reused the first record and changed only the field they had to. It is the same mistake as any copied form, made by an organisation whose day job is measuring distance to a fraction of the width of a proton.
- One upstream fits a facility whose data goes to a small number of computing centres over research networks rather than to the public.
- Nothing published in reverse DNS is normal for scientific instruments, which are reached by the people who run them and nobody else.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
Transit providers
1 upstream, 0 downstream and 1 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
| AS | Network | Paths seen |
|---|---|---|
| AS23265 | Pocketinet Communications, Inc | 65 |
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-19, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 1 prefixes · 1.02K addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| US | United States of America | 1 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- ARIN
- Handle
AS14940- Registry name
- LIGO-HANFORD-OBSERVATORY
- Registrant
- LIGO Livingston Observatory
- Abuse contact
- giardina@caltech.edu
- Registered
- 2010-10-15
- Last changed
- 2025-03-28
- Allocation
- assigned
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 0% valid · 0 valid, 1 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 0 authorising AS14940
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 1 of 1 announcements
- Route objects
- 2 naming AS14940
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 442 networks and 1,778 prefixes, as published 2026-10-20. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere