Base unit (measurement) aspects of the world, such as time, distance, velocity, mass, temperature, energy, and weight, and "units" are used to describe their magnitude or quantity. Many of these quantities are related to each other by various physical laws, and as a result the units of a quantities can be generally be expressed as a product of powers of other units; for example, momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, while velocity is measured in distance divided by time. These relationships are discussed in dimensional analysis. Those that can be expressed in this fashion in terms of the base units are called .
Chirp mass terms of other common mass parameters: where formula_7 is the total mass of the system, formula_8 is the reduced mass of the system, formula_9 is the mass ratio, and formula_10 is the symmetric mass ratio. In general relativity, the phase evolution of a binary orbit can be computed using a post-Newtonian expansion, a perturbative expansion in powers of the orbital velocity formula_11. The first order gravitational wave frequency, formula_12, evolution is described by the differential equation where formula_14 and formula_15 are the speed of light and Newton's gravitational constant, respectively. Integrating equation () with respect to time gives: where C