Gravitational Wave Chirp

Binary black hole inspiral: as the orbit decays via gravitational wave emission, the frequency and amplitude sweep upward (the "chirp"). GW150914 lasted ~0.2s in LIGO's band. Below: the signal, spectrogram, and matched filter SNR.

M₁ (M☉): 36 M₂ (M☉): 29 Noise: 15 Dist (Mpc): 410

h(t) ∝ (GMc/c²)^(5/3) · (πf)^(2/3) · cos(Φ(t)) / r | f(τ) = (1/π)(5/256)^(3/8) · (c³/GMc)^(5/8) · τ^(-3/8) | τ = time to merger