# Gravitational Wave Project for College Students

**URL:** <https://ask.igwn.org/t/gravitational-wave-project-for-college-students/111>\
**Category:** Data Analysis\
**Created:** [April 20, 2022, 3:50am UTC](https://ask.igwn.org/t/gravitational-wave-project-for-college-students/111 "2022-04-20T03:50:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ptolemy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b38774/32.png) [@Ptolemy](https://ask.igwn.org/u/Ptolemy)\
**Post date:** [April 20, 2022, 3:50am UTC](https://ask.igwn.org/t/gravitational-wave-project-for-college-students/111/1 "2022-04-20T03:50:39Z")

</div>

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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![virtuoso](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/8baadc/32.png) [@virtuoso](https://ask.igwn.org/u/virtuoso)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2022, 6:42am UTC](https://ask.igwn.org/t/gravitational-wave-project-for-college-students/111/2 "2022-04-21T06:42:53Z")

</div>

Hi @Ptolemy  
Thank you for your question, first I think your students could follow the tutorials on GWOSC website [GWOSC](https://www.gw-openscience.org/tutorials/) , 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](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](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01940) : I think it’s a very good starting point for understanding the physics beyond the data