Virgo collaboration tagged posts

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...