LIGO-Virgo Archives

October 23, 2024October 23, 2024 by Evan Gough

NASA is Building Telescopes for the LISA Mission

NASA is supplying all six telescopes for their joint LISA mission with the ESA. In this image, a technician is inspecting a prototype in a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Image Credit: NASA/Dennis Henry

Some of the most cataclysmic and mysterious events in the cosmos only reveal themselves by their gravitational waves. We’ve detected some of them with our ground-based detectors, but the size of these detectors is limited. The next step forward in gravitational wave (GW) astronomy is a space-based detector: LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

Primordial Black Holes Can Only Explain a Fraction of Dark Matter

This artist's illustration shows what primordial black holes might look like. In reality, the black holes would struggle to form accretion disks, as shown. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

What is Dark Matter? That question is prominent in discussions about the nature of the Universe. There are many proposed explanations for dark matter, both within the Standard Model and outside of it.

One proposed component of dark matter is primordial black holes, created in the early Universe without a collapsing star as a progenitor.

April 9, 2024April 9, 2024 by Mark Thompson

A Neutron Star Merged with a Surprisingly Light Black Hole

Artwork of a neutron star–black hole merger. Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav-Swinburne University.

Galactic collisions, meteor impacts and even stellar mergers are not uncommon events. neutron stars colliding with black holes however are a little more rare, in fact, until now, we have never observed one. The fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing detected gravitational waves from a collision between a black hole and neutron star 650 million light years away. The black hole was tiny though with a mass between 2.5 to 4.5 times that of the Sun.

January 13, 2024January 13, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Gravitational Waves Could Show us the First Minute of the Universe

Astronomers routinely explore the universe using different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum from the familiar visible light to radio waves and infra-red to gamma rays. There is a problem with studying the Universe through the electromagnetic spectrum, we can only see light from a time when the Universe was only 380,000 years old. An alternate approach is to use gravitational waves which are thought to have been present in the early Universe and may allow us to probe back even further.

July 10, 2023July 10, 2023 by Matt Williams

A Black Hole Switched On in the Blink of an Eye

This artist’s impression depicts a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. This thin disc of rotating material consists of the leftovers of a Sun-like star which was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. Shocks in the colliding debris as well as heat generated in accretion led to a burst of light, resembling a supernova explosion. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

In 2019, a team of astronomers led by Dr. Samantha Oates of the University of Birmingham discovered one of the most powerful transients ever seen – where astronomical objects change their brightness over a short period. Oates and her colleagues found this object, known as J221951-484240 (or J221951), using the Ultra-Violet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) on NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory while searching for the source of a gravitational wave (GW) that was thought to be caused by two massive objects merging in our galaxy.

Multiple follow-up observations were made using the UVOT and Swift’s other instruments – the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) and X-Ray Telescope (XRT), the Hubble Space Telescope, the South African Large Telescope (SALT), the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), and more. The combined observations and spectra revealed that the source was a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a distant galaxy that mysteriously “switched on,” becoming one of the most dramatic bursts of brightness ever seen with a black hole.