First Evidence for Binary Black Hole Mergers

An artist’s impression of two stars orbiting each other and progressing (from left to right) to merger with resulting gravitational waves. [Image: NASA]
What did the merger look like?
SXS Collaboration: What the first LIGO detection would look like |
SXS Collaboration: Warped Spacetime and Horizons of GW150914 |
What does the merger sound like?
This sound clip has been generated using real data from GW150914. The sound-wave frequencies have been increased to make the merger audible to human ears.
What role did CITA play in this detection?
The local members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration are Prof. Harald Pfeiffer, Postdoctoral Fellow Prayush Kumar, and Heather Fong, a graduate student in Physics. A fourth member, CITA Senior Research Associate Kipp Cannon recently left to a faculty position at the University of Tokyo. CITA researchers have contributed to the search pipelines that identified GW150914. They have also contributed to the theoretical waveforms that are used to determine the masses and spins of the identified event, have estimated how often such events occur, and performed cross-checks with supercomputer calculations of merging black holes.
More information on the gravitational wave detection.
To read the technical papers discussing the event.
Published on: Feb 11, 2016