Can anyone advise me on how to go about extracting the luminosity distance of a source from the data?
Hi,
Thank you for the question!
There are different answers to this, depending on how careful an analysis you’d like to do.
Amplitude scales as 1/D
The first thing to know is that the amplitude of a signal scales linearly with the distance. So - if you double the distance, the amplitude will be halved. This means that the amplitude of the signal gives a good indication of the distance. You can see how this works using the Waveform Fitter app by Chris North. You can also read more about this in the FindCHIRP or Data Analysis Guide papers.
Open Data Workshops describe parameter estimation
For a more detailed approach, you can look at materials in the Open Data Workshops. For example, the lectures and tutorials on parameter estimation show how the most likely parameters for each source our calculated.
Good luck!
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