Scalogram of Gravitational Wave from a Binary Black Hole Inspiral

Compact binary objects (e.g. black hole pairs, binary neutron stars, or neutron star and black hole) emit gravitational waves with increasing frequency when they are in inspiral orbital phase. The emitted gravitational waveform can be derived from post-Newtonian expansions. In this Demonstration the chirp characteristic of the point-mass, zero-spin binary inspiral waveform is shown in scalograms using different wavelet decompositions. You can change the masses of the binary objects to see the effect on the time-frequency morphology in the resulting scalogram.