Gravitational-wave observatories have released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, bringing their total number of detections to 90. The new crop of 35 events includes one featuring the lightest neutron star ever seen, as well as two clashes involving surprisingly large black holes.
The detections come from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) sites, in Louisiana and Washington State, and their sister detector, Virgo, in Italy. They were recorded during 21 weeks of operations, beginning on 1 November 2019, that racked up an average detection rate of one event every 4.2 days. Since then, the collaboration has expanded to include the KAGRA detector in Japan, which started making observations in February 2020. The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration describes its results in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint repository1.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time that are produced when large masses accelerate. Like the...
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