LIGO and Virgo made 5 likely gravitational wave detections in a month
Spacetime ripples came from colliding black holes, neutron stars and maybe a new kind of event
Gravitational wave sightings are now a weekly occurrence.
It took decades of work to find the first set of ripples in spacetime, detected in 2015 (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). But now, just a month after reviving the search with newly revamped detectors, scientists with the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories have already made five potential sightings of the tiny, elusive tremors.
“The entire astrophysics community is very excited,” astrophysicist Jess McIver of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech said during a telephone news conference May 2. “We’re quickly building up a catalog of events.”