Week 8: Applying My Method to a New Set of Events

This week, I tested a second set of events selected from GWOSC. I used the same Bayesian damped-sinusoid fitting method as before to carry out a triage analysis on those events. This allowed me to differentiate between events with interpretable ringdown fits and those whose frequency or damping time estimations were still unusable under the existing standard. After the first screening, I sorted the events by quality and reran the strongest ones with different ringdown start times to see how much the fitted values changed across multiple window choices. I adjusted the structure of the notebook so that it can track how the combined bounds change as more events are added. The larger provisional combination did not change the overall picture of the result as the validated sample still gave an upper bound of 20.07% on the frequency shift and 43.39% on the damping time shift. These bounds became 16.53% and 43.03% when the better provisional events were added. These results remain broadly consistent with the Kerr expectation.

I also adjusted the event-selection procedure of the notebook so that it now can separate events into different categories before core analysis. This helps prevent weak or unstable events from being added directly to the final constraint. In addition, I built a catalog-assisted event sample using metadata from GWOSC. I used qnm to estimate rough Kerr quasinormal-mode reference values based on estimations of remnant mass and an anticipated final spin. This enables a scalable structure for adding more events to the project while keeping the final constraint limited to events with credible ringdown fits.