Gravitational Wave Data Analysis Project 2 - 33-467: Astrophysics for Stars & the Galaxy
Main Contributors:
- Alex Arteaga ([email protected])
- Chris Choi ([email protected])
This project uses Gravitational Wave Open Science Center website for tutorials, specifically the following tutorials:
The main description for the project comes from class:
"The discovery of Gravitational Waves by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration in 2015 marked a feat of science nearly 100 years in the making following their prediction by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. The detection of two merging black holes that were more than a billion light years away led to the 2016 Nobel Prize being awarded to Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. The work was carried out by over a thousand people though – the detection was a physics experiment in and of itself!
Luckily for us, the LIGO Science Collaboration has produced tutorials for interested folks to download and play with their data so that you can learn exactly how gravitational wave data analysis works. For this project, you should work through the "Guide to GW detections and noise" tutorial on the GW open science center website. Once you’ve finished that tutorial, you can move onto the "Searching for astrophysical sources" section to find an insprialing source. By the end of the project, you should have a lot of figures and be able to describe how each analysis step works.
All tutorials and code run on python jupyter notebooks.
To run these notebooks on a local machine, we installed the IGWN Conda Distribution. To make setup easier, we created a notebook in our setup directiory to run and install the conda environment necessary to run the tutorials much more quickly.