What to watch for
The single most important quantity is the chirp mass, not the individual masses. Two very different pairs with the same sweep through frequency in nearly the same way: which is precisely how detectors weigh distant black holes they will never see. Watch the spectrogram: the bright track curving upward is , and it gets brighter as the amplitude builds, because louder really does mean closer to merger.
Lighter binaries are the high-pitched ones. Because , a pair of 5-solar-mass objects merges up near a few hundred hertz while a pair of 80-solar-mass giants rings at only tens of hertz. Slide the masses and watch the whole event compress or stretch, and the merger line slide left or right. After the dashed merger marker the trace turns warm: that short, exponentially-fading wobble is the remnant black hole shedding its last asymmetry: the "ringing" of spacetime itself.
Knobs
- m₁ (M☉): the first object's mass in solar masses (5–80). Together with m₂ it sets the chirp mass and the merger frequency.
- m₂ (M☉): the second object's mass (5–80). Make the pair lighter to push the merger to higher frequency and shorten the whole event; heavier to lower the pitch.
- Spectrogram — toggle the rising frequency track above the waveform. It makes the sweep and the amplitude build directly visible.