Hello #Astrodon
I'm a gravitational-wave astronomer researching the formation and evolution of black holes and neutron stars
I primarily work on LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA data analysis, inferring source properties, but I'm also interested in space-based observatories like LISA
I enjoy #SciComm (I want to get back into blogging https://cplberry.com/blog/), and I'm currently a member of the community-science Gravity Spy project https://gravityspy.org/
I also like cake
My avatar pic is a doodle I drew for a LIGO Magazine article about how we infer the properties of a #GravitaitonalWave source for the signal, for example how we measure the masses of merging black holes
https://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-7.pdf#page=32
The Doodle shows Monty and Carla exploring the distribution of source masses. The names are a pun as we use Markov-chain Monte Carlo samplers as part of our analysis
Gravitational-wave astronomy uses observations of gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime created by accelerating masses—to learn about the Universe. But how do we go from gravitational-wave data to measuring the masses of the black holes that emitted the signal?
This infographic explains how information about the properties of a binary black hole coalescence is encoded in the waveform
📈 : https://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-8-extended.pdf#page=6
John F. Wu
Dr Christopher Berry
CosmicRami
Helena Pérez Valle
Maria
Charlotte Horseface