GW150914: The Birth of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

What is a Gravitational Wave? It is the ripples in the curvature of spacetime propagating as waves. It has not been detected for a long time since its strain amplitude is extremely low and the detectors were not sensitive enough. Thanks to LIGO that their detectors have been sensitive enough to detect it. Here, a matched filtering analysis have been performed to investigate the truth about the detection, where the strain data from the two interferometers have been whitened and filtered using bandpass and notch filter. It ultimately gets matched with the NR template very well. A good way to search for a gravitational wave is performing a blind burst search where the signal. Here, the the signal has shown some properties which also has confirmed the detection of gravitational wave as well. There are three phases for the event-inspiral, merger, ringdown among which the merger and the ringdown is still not clear. When their relativistic motion begins only one approach can successfully explain the whole scenario’Effective One Body’ formalism. Here it explains a lot about the last stages of inspiral and the merger. To understand the ringdown phase an easy but effective way is to comapre it with a similar looking signal model. The dominant QNM ringdown frequency is the frequency of the least damped part. It has been determined with the frequency equation of ringdown phase and the analytical value gets very well matched with the observed wave. In the low frequency domain (≈ 1 Hz) classical mechanics holds good . So, applying simple physics for compact binaries it is possible to predict the existence of gravitational wave in that domain.