Abstract: Since the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory detected the gravitational wave event GW150914 in 2015, the gravitatinoal wave window has been opened to explore the Universe. Gravitational wave research has become a hotspot in physics and astronomy, and it helped three gravitational wave experts to win the Nobel Prize in 2017. Although the frontier of gravitational wave research requires advanced methods such as numerical relativity and large-scale high-performance numerical computation, the core principle of gravitational wave data analysis is actually very simple. In this paper, we try to demonstrate the use of simple mathematical principles to analyze gravitational wave data: through the short-time Fourier transform, the time domain gravitational wave data can be transformed into the time-frequency domain; the time-frequency relation of the binary black hole inspiral signal is matched with the data to obtain the most probable value of the mass of the binary dense star, the moment of merger. Comparison with the official results of LIGO shows that the relevant method, although with limited accuracy, the above simple mathematical principle can efficiently extract the physical parameters of the gravitational wave source when the noise behaviour is close to ideal.

Key words: gravitational waves, data analysis, time-frequency analysis, constant-Q transform