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Gravitational Wave Chirp

ProMax

On 14 September 2015 two black holes a billion light-years away spiralled together, and their collision rang spacetime like a bell. LIGO's twin interferometers caught the signal — GW150914 — and the Q-transform spectrogram that plotted it became the defining image of a new astronomy. This system is that plot, read straight off the instrument: a solid black-to-dark-indigo canvas, a monospace grid of Hz and seconds, and a single bright arc — indigo to blue to cyan to green to yellow — sweeping upward as the chirp climbs to ~250 Hz at merger. Data first, ornament never.

Learn more about the Gravitational Wave Chirp style

  • OriginUnited States (LIGO — Hanford & Livingston; Caltech / MIT)
  • Period2015 (GW150914 first direct detection; announced Feb 2016)
  • DesignerRainer Weiss · Kip Thorne · Barry Barish · LIGO Scientific Collaboration
  • MovementsGravitational-wave astronomy · Scientific data-plot visualization

Web examples

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Slide examples

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