Gravitational Waves Have Officially Been Detected Again

By: Alfredo Carpineti/IFL Science  Scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the VIRGO collaboration have announced in a press conference the detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes for the fourth time. However, this time it was seen by three observatories.

The two black holes that merged are located 1.7 billion light-years away, with a mass of 30.5 and 25.3 times the mass of the Sun, respectively. This discovery has been reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“This is just the beginning of observations with the network-enabled by Virgo and LIGO working together,” says David Shoemaker of MIT, LSC spokesperson, in a statement. “With the next observing run planned for Fall 2018 we can expect such detections weekly or even more often.”

The use of three detectors has also allowed astronomers to significantly constrain the area in the sky where these objects might originate from. However, since they don’t emit light, no optical counterpart was observed with telescopes.

The merger was detected on August 14, and it marks the first time that three gravitational wave observatories have detected the same event. The previous three detections of gravitational waves were only observed by the two LIGO detectors, one located in Washington State and the other in Louisiana. The VIRGO detector has been receiving an important upgrade, and only joined the other two on August 1, just in time to spot this cosmic collision.

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