LIGO

Gravitational waves are ripples in the very fabric of spacetime, caused by some of the biggest cataclysms in the cosmos. Now, an international team of scientists has presented the full catalog of these events, gathered over the last few years across two observation runs.

Last year astronomers around the world witnessed the merger of two neutron stars as gravitational waves, light, radio and gamma rays, but the aftermath of the mashup hasn’t played out quite as expected. Rather than fade over time, the afterglow has continued to brighten.

The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for past detections of gravitational waves, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the “cosmic lighthouses” of the sky.

A team of scientists has announced the fifth detection of gravitational waves, but there’s a groundbreaking difference this time: the ripples were caused by the collision of two neutron stars, meaning the event was accompanied by light, radio, and other electromagnetic signals for the first time.

The 2015 detection of gravitational waves is one of the most important scientific discoveries in a century. It’s no surprise then that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists at the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration, for that groundbreaking discovery.

Another day, another detection of gravitational waves. LIGO has just detected gravitational waves for the fourth time, but it wasn’t alone this time: the signals were also measured by the Virgo detector in Italy, marking a new milestone in the observation of the Universe.

The LISA Pathfinder satellite was shut down this week, after 16 months of service hunting for gravitational waves. But this is only the beginning: the satellite was a testbed for technology that will eventually be used in the main LISA mission, the largest gravitational wave observatory ever built.

​In 2015, LIGO detected gravitational waves for the first time, by observing tiny wobbles in laser beams, but a newly launched telescope in Spain is aiming to see them more directly, scouring the skies for the optical signals associated with gravitational waves.

​​An international team of astronomers is planning to use gravitational wave data to unravel the formation processes that created the first supermassive black holes.

Scientists making use of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) instruments have announced the second confirmed detection of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two black holes.