UPDATED 10.03.17 – Three scientists who were architects and leaders of the LIGO discovery have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

UPDATED 3.14.17 to reflect inclusion of Stan as part of the LIGO discovery. (Stan was added as a NumFOCUS project after the initial LIGO announcement.)

We are excited to share that four NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored projects were featured in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announcement on the confirmed observation of gravitational waves emanating from the merger of two black holes! The observation of these waves, predicted from theory for decades, provides further confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

LIGO uses IPython/Jupyter in this notebook to explain the signal processing used in the discovery. In the notebook, you can see how they use NumPy to process data from the observatory (with SciPy signal processing algorithms) and then display it with Matplotlib and its new viridis colormap. The Stan Markov-Chain Monte Carlo sampler was used, as well.

NumFOCUS is thrilled to play a part in significant scientific discoveries like this one through our continued support of scientific computing tools!

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Support these key tools and contribute to further scientific discoveries:
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