Last year, the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result—but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia—it’s likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, “a pair of…
Tag: gravitational wave
Dance of 3 stars confirms Einstein’s ‘most fortunate thought’
Researchers in Europe have now confirmed the universality of free fall – which Einstein called his most fortunate thought – with extremely high precision. To do it, they spent 8 years tracking a triple star system containing a millisecond pulsar. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/pulsar-psr-j03371715-einstein-universality-of-free-fall…
Scientists reveal new insights of exploding massive stars and future gravitational wave detectors
In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Jade Powell and Dr. Bernhard Mueller from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) simulated three core-collapse supernovae using supercomputers from across Australia, including the OzSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne University of Technology. The simulation models—which are 39 times, 20 times and 18 times…
Future detectors to detect millions of black holes and the evolution of the universe
Gravitational-wave astronomy provides a unique new way to study the expansion history of the Universe. On 17 August 2017, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations first detected gravitational waves from a pair of neutron stairs merging. The gravitational wave signal was accompanied by a range of counterparts identified with electromagnetic telescopes. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-04-future-detectors-millions-black-holes.html…
TAMA300 blazes trail for improved gravitational wave astronomy
Researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have used the infrastructure of the former TAMA300 gravitational wave detector in Mitaka, Tokyo, to demonstrate a new technique to reduce quantum noise in detectors. This new technique will increase the sensitivity of the detectors comprising a collaborative worldwide gravitational wave network, allowing them to observe fainter waves. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-04-tama300-blazes-trail-gravitational-astronomy.html…
A unique (so far) gravitational wave signal
LIGO and Virgo detectors have now captured the first gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger where the black hole masses are unequal. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/a-gravitational-wave-signal-like-none-before…
What are gravitational waves?
First postulated by Albert Einstein in 1916 but not observed directly until September 2015, gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/definition-what-are-gravitational-waves…
LIGO and Virgo detectors catch first gravitational wave from binary black hole merger with unequal masses
The expectations of the gravitational-wave research community have been fulfilled: gravitational-wave discoveries are now part of their daily work as they have identified in the past observing run, O3, new gravitational-wave candidates about once a week. But now, the researchers have published a remarkable signal unlike any of those seen before: GW190412 is the first observation of a binary black hole…
Researchers find gravitational wave candidates from binary black hole mergers in public LIGO/Virgo data
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover together with international colleagues have published their second Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (2-OGC). They used improved search methods to dig deeper into publicly available data from LIGO’s and Virgo’s first and second observation runs. Apart from confirming the ten known binary black hole mergers and one binary…
Future space detector LISA could reveal the secret life and death of stars
A team of astrophysicists led by Ph.D. student Mike Lau, from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), recently predicted that gravitational waves of double neutron stars may be detected by the future space satellite LISA. The results were presented at the 14th annual Australian National Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (ANITA) science workshop 2020. These measurements may help…