Gravitational wave data using Python analysis

U.S. scientists announced 11th that they first detected gravitational waves last September. This discovery confirms the prophecy of the physicist Einstein 100 years ago. Announcing the discovery was the head of the laser-interferometric gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

The institution was born in the 90 's and has been observed for nearly 30 years by gravitational wave observations. So the amount of gravitational wave data that is observed should be large, how do scientists analyze these data? Do you use a Python programming language?

the answer is yes. In GitHub, I found a python package for analyzing gravitational wave data: gwpy[1]. According to defenders, Gwpy's code came from Ligo and another agency named Virgo, and defenders sorted out the Python code of the two agency scientists, and the final product was gwpy this user-friendly Python package.

In the specific introduction of gwpy before, first to the same as the author of the White Simple science of gravitational waves and ligo knowledge.

What is gravitational wave?

This is visualization shows the gravitational waves produced by two orbiting black holes. (Credit:nasa)

Pictured above is a three-to-four simulation of gravitational waves generated by two black holes (NASA).

First, what is gravitational wave? In physics, gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, a space-time wave that travels at the speed of light, and as the ripples in the water, the gravitational waves are seen as "spacetime ripples" in the universe. Usually gravitational waves are very difficult to produce, the Earth around the sun at a rate of 30-kilometer per second forward, the power emitted by the gravitational wave of only 200 watts, but also less than the power of household rice cookers. Events such as acceleration, collisions, and mergers of large mass objects in the universe can form powerful gravitational waves, but the sources that produce such strong gravitational waves are far away from Earth and become very faint when transmitted to Earth.

Here are two good videos that explain the rationale behind the gravitational ripple. The first one comes from Ligo, the second is the more popular comic-type explanation.

Ligo scientists ' explanation:

Comic-type popular explanation:

What is Ligo?

Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observation Observatory Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatoryligo is a collaborating laboratory at Caltech (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and there are other universities involved. The experiment was funded by the National Science Foundation. Ligo is used to look for gravitational waves in the universe to verify the existence of black holes and to test general relativity.