Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sat, 03/25/2023 - 23:22
It has come to my attention that in May there will be the 2023 Gravitational Wave Open Data Workshop. This would be an excellent opportunity for those interested in learning about gravitational waves and could possibly produce ideas for new projects or opportunities for AAVSO members. It is a free event that goes from May 15-May 17, 2023. This includes lectures, classes, tutorials, and study groups. The website is https://www.gw-openscience.org/odw/odw2023/. This is sponsored by the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA (LVK) collaboration. They have completed observation runs O1, O2, and O3 and have all observational data available to the public, with more than 90 detections of compact mergers. Check it out!
Dave
A little warning: GW data looks nothing like the data we amateur astronomers are most familiar with, e.g. image data, spectra and light curves. The data that is released by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration is best compared to audio data, or perhaps also seismic data as well: it's basically a stream of floating point numbers, sampled at 16 kHz, whith a usable frequency range of ca 10 Hz up to ca 2000 Hz. Somewhere in there, gravitational wave sources leave their traces as short duration chirps or long duration , near constant frequency tones (the latter is yet to be discovered). And to make it harder, the data is quite noisy. So in theory you could just convert it to audio data and sit there with headphones, Jodie Foster/Contact-style, and try to hear a characteristic chirp, but only the very loudest (and rare) events can be heard this way above the noise, the more common events require quite a bit of computing power to dig out below the noise. So if you come from a background of, say, seismology, or submarine-warfare (sonar :-) ), you are probably more likely to be able to make sense of the data than when you are trained for standard variable star astronomy.
The potential for amateurs to make discoveries in this data (in the sense of finding new GW events) is very, very limited. Even tho the data is "open" in the sense that you can download it freely, it is published only with a considerable delay, not before the scientists running the collaboration that built the detectors have had a chance to go thru the data first and publish their results in journals. In order to claim a detection, you need to derive some astrophysical statements from the mere waveform you detected (e.g. distance, type of objects involved in the event) and this requires quite a bit of know-how, like the stuff they teach in the workshop. Knowing how to code in Python helps a lot, because most of the software used to analyse this data is either written in Python or has top-level wrappers in Python.
CS
HB