Gravitational Wave Project for College Students

Data Analysis
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I am teaching a college-level scientific programming course to STEM students who are all well versed in programming in Python. We are currently using NumPy, MatPlotLib, Pandas, and Jupyter notebooks. They have done numerical solutions of differential equations and Fast Fourier Transforms.

Are there activities that we can do? We would like to read a subset of the LIGO data for some gravitational wave event, use the Python tools that we have learned, and analyze and visualize the dataset. Let me know if you have a simple project that my students can work on.

BTW, I participated in your workshop at the AAPT two years ago and absolutely loved it.

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Hi @Ptolemy
Thank you for your question, first I think your students could follow the tutorials on GWOSC website GWOSC , in particular I would recommend the “Guide to GW detections and noise”, with which you should be able to reproduce the figures in the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.11170.pdf .

Finally, I would recommend the paper [1608.01940] The basic physics of the binary black hole merger GW150914 : I think it’s a very good starting point for understanding the physics beyond the data

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