LIGO tagged posts

Visualization of the gravitational wave emission from a pair of orbiting compact objects. Credit: NASA

Next-generation gravitational wave detector in space will complement LIGO on Earth. The historic first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes far outside our galaxy opened a new window to understanding the universe. A string of detections – 4 more binary black holes and a pair of neutron stars – soon followed the Sept. 14, 2015, observation. Now, another detector is being built. LISA is expected to be in space in 2034, and it will be sensitive to gravitational waves of a lower frequency than those detected by the Earth-bound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

A new Northwestern University study predicts dozens of binaries (pairs of orbiting co...

Drs Eric Thrane and Rory Smith. Credit: Image courtesy of Monash University

Deep space is not as silent as we have been led to believe. Every few minutes a pair of black holes smash into each other. These cataclysms release ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. Now Monash University scientists have developed a way to listen in on these events. The gravitational waves from black hole mergers imprint a distinctive whooping sound in the data collected by gravitational-wave detectors. The new technique is expected to reveal the presence of thousands of previously hidden black holes by teasing out their faint whoops from a sea of static.

Last year, in one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the 21st century, LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and Virgo Collabo...

Snapshot of gravitational waves propagating from binary black holes merging inside of a star. Credit: Kyoto University, Joseph M. Fedrow

Far from earth, two black holes orbit around each other propagating waves that bend time and space. Gravitational waves was first predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago on the basis of his theory of general relativity. And as always: Einstein was right. But it took until 2015 for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to detect gravitational waves for the first time: findings which earned the LIGO team the Nobel Prize in physics two years later. In addition to the shockwave this discovery sent across the scientific community, it also gave researchers the new field of gravitational wave astronomy...

LIGO detected gravitational waves radiating from two black holes that crashed together about 1.3 billion years ago, simulation pictured. Researchers from Kyoto University have suggested the two black holes detected by Ligo could be ‘primordial’ black holes, instead of traditional black holes

An interdisciplinary team of physicists and astronomers at the University of Amsterdam’s GRAPPA Center of Excellence for Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics has devised a new strategy to search for ‘primordial’ black holes produced in the early universe. Such black holes are possibly responsible for the gravitational wave events observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory LIGO.

The researchers specifically show that the lack of bright X-ray and radio sources at the center of o...