Polygence Scholar2025
Shalini Sinha
Class of 2026Redmond, Washington
About
Projects
- "What can be inferred from the GW150914 signal about the merger event?" with mentor Husni (Working project)
Project Portfolio
What can be inferred from the GW150914 signal about the merger event?
Started May 29, 2025
Abstract or project description
GW150914 is the first event that was detected by the LIGO interferometers. It was caused by the collision and merging of two black holes. LIGO is a large-scale observatory that detects gravitational waves. There are two of these interferometers, one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. The goal of this project is to use LIGO’s publicly available data on GW150914 to plot waveforms to help visualize the inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases using matplotlib in Python and use these plots to identify key features of the event like the individual black hole masses, spins, chirp mass, etc.