Gravitational waves: biggest black hole merger ever detected revealed

Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol43 Issue99 10–14 December 2018

CGP physicists in RSPE have celebrated the announcement by LIGO & Virgo & OzGrav (ARC Centre of Excellence) of 4 new binary black hole collisions including the biggest, fastest spinning and furthest merger ever recorded. All four newly confirmed black hole coalescences were found in the archived data from the observing run in 2017, coming to light as a result of further data cleaning and recalibration and refinement of the searches. A description of these detections has been released as part of the catalogue of detections by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) in the US and the Advanced Virgo facility in Italy. The newly announced detections bring the total number of black hole mergers detected to 10 – plus a single binary neutron star merger – over the past three years.

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