Congratulations to the LIGO and VIRGO Collaborations from Project Jupyter
This blog post was co-authored by Jessica Forde.
On behalf of the entire Project Jupyter team, we’d like to say congratulations to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne and the rest of the LIGO and VIRGO teams for the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017. Since 2015, the LIGO and VIRGO Collaborations have observed multiple instances of gravitational waves due to colliding black holes (and more recently neutron stars). These observations represent decades of work and confirm what Einstein had theorized a hundred years ago.
The LIGO and VIRGO Collaborations are exemplars in utilizing open-source software to promote practices of open science through their Open Science Center. The Open Science Center is a portal for the sharing of data, software, analysis, and discoveries from the LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration. To communicate to the broader community, the LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration has created tutorials with Jupyter Notebooks that describe how to use LIGO/VIRGO data and reproduce analyses related to their academic publications. Most notably, they published a tutorial for working with Binary Black Hole Data.
Posting notebooks and data has enabled the Jupyter community, including our own Min Ragan-Kelley, to make these notebooks interactive by putting them on Binder, a service originally created by Jeremy Freeman and Andrew Osheroff, then at Janelia. Binder allows any GitHub repository with Jupyter Notebooks to be turned into a live, runnable notebook instance that anyone in the world can access instantly. Today, LIGO makes interactive tutorials for each new gravitational wave event by posting links to Binder and Azure Notebooks so users can interact with the data and Jupyter Notebooks in an online environment. They are truly some of our best examples of Binder in action to date!
To visit the LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration’s tutorials, click here.
Watch this blog for some exciting upcoming announcements related to Binder.
