Black Holes of All Shapes and Sizes in Largest Catalog of Gravitational Wave Events Ever Assembled

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Black Holes of All Shapes and Sizes in Largest Catalog of Gravitational Wave Events Ever Assembled:

The largest catalog of gravitational wave events ever assembled has been released by an international collaboration that includes Penn State researchers. Gravitational waves are ripples in space time produced as aftershocks of huge astronomical events, such as the collision of two black holes. Using a global network of detectors, the research team identified 35 gravitational wave events, bringing the total number of observed events to 90 since detection efforts began in 2015.

The new gravitational wave events were observed between November 2019 and March 2020, using three international detectors: The two Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington state in the U.S. and the Advanced Virgo detector in Italy. Data from these three detectors were carefully analyzed by a team of scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration and the KAGRA Collaboration. The catalog of new events from the second half of LIGO's third observing run is described in a new paper.

"In the third observation run of LIGO and Virgo, we have begun to detect the more elusive types of gravitational wave events," said Debnandini Mukherjee, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State and a member of the LIGO collaboration. "This has included heavy mass black holes, more extreme mass ratio binaries and neutron star-black hole coalescences detected with higher confidence. We are in the exciting era where such observations have begun to question conventionally known astrophysics and have begun to contribute towards a clearer understanding of formations of such objects."

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