Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around the giant black hole. (credit: J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521, ” it was […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm regarding smaller black holes in some sort of gas disk rotating around a good giant black hole. (credit: M. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) Within 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration selected up a gravitational wave transmission from a black hole merging that proved to be 1 for the record books. Called “GW190521, […]
Enlarge / Artist’s representation of the merger of two neutron stars to form a black hole (hidden within bright bulge at center of image). The merger generates opposing, high-energy jets of material (blue) that heat up material around the stars, making it emit X-rays (reddish clouds). (credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) Back in 2017, astronomers detected a […]
Enlarge / A simulation of a black hole merger. (credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)) I was pretty excited when LIGO, the giant double-eared gravitational wave observatory in the US, detected the first gravitational waves . When Virgo came online , triangulating gravitational wave signals became possible, and gravitational wave astronomy became a reality. Once the […]
The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate “mixed” mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling across spacetime. Those signals were detected last year by the collaboration, just 10 days apart. A year and a half later, the events officially constitute […]