.. _sphx_glr_api_gallery_relativity_gravitational_waves:

Gravitational waves
---------------------

Binary black hole and binary neutron star inspiral chirps and ringdown.


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  <div id='sg-tag-list' class='sphx-glr-tag-list'></div>


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    <div class="sphx-glr-thumbnails">

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    <div class="sphx-glr-thumbcontainer" tooltip="On September 14, 2015, LIGO detected a gravitational wave chirp from two black holes (roughly 36 and 29 solar masses) spiraling together and merging 1.3 billion light-years away -- the first direct detection of gravitational waves, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in 1916 that took a century to observe. This example generates a toy inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) waveform for a comparable system using the leading-order (Newtonian quadrupole) inspiral formula, in which the gravitational-wave frequency sweeps upward as">

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  .. image:: /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/images/thumb/sphx_glr_plot_binary_merger_chirp_thumb.png
    :alt:

  :doc:`/api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_binary_merger_chirp`

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      <div class="sphx-glr-thumbnail-title">GW150914: the first direct detection of gravitational waves</div>
    </div>


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    <div class="sphx-glr-thumbcontainer" tooltip="On 17 August 2017, LIGO and Virgo detected the inspiral of two neutron stars -- far lighter than any binary black hole seen before, and correspondingly slower-chirping: the signal remained in the detectors&#x27; sensitive band for over a minute, instead of the fraction of a second GW150914&#x27;s ~30-solar-mass black holes took. The measured chirp mass,">

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  .. image:: /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/images/thumb/sphx_glr_plot_gw170817_neutron_star_merger_thumb.png
    :alt:

  :doc:`/api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_gw170817_neutron_star_merger`

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      <div class="sphx-glr-thumbnail-title">GW170817: the first binary neutron star merger</div>
    </div>


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    <div class="sphx-glr-thumbcontainer" tooltip="Long before LIGO&#x27;s 2015 direct detection, Hulse and Taylor&#x27;s 1974 discovery of the binary pulsar PSR B1913+16 gave the first evidence that gravitational waves are real: the pair&#x27;s orbital period has been measured to shrink at almost exactly the rate General Relativity predicts for energy loss to gravitational radiation, accumulating to a spectacular match after decades of radio timing -- work that earned the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. Peters (1964) showed that a binary of masses m_1, m_2 and eccentricity e on a semi-major axis a shrinks at a rate">

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  .. image:: /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/images/thumb/sphx_glr_plot_hulse_taylor_decay_thumb.png
    :alt:

  :doc:`/api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_hulse_taylor_decay`

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      <div class="sphx-glr-thumbnail-title">The Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar: the first (indirect) evidence for gravitational waves</div>
    </div>


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    </div>


.. toctree::
   :hidden:

   /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_binary_merger_chirp
   /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_gw170817_neutron_star_merger
   /api/gallery/relativity/gravitational_waves/plot_hulse_taylor_decay