LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration announces 90 gravitational wave discoveries to date
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration unveiled several studies that shed important new light on the nature of gravitational waves—ripples in time and space produced by merging black holes and/or neutron stars. They include a “census” of gravitational wave events to date and a new catalog of results from the second half of its third observing run (O3b), describing 90 gravitational wave events observed since making their first detection in 2015. Students and faculty from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) were heavily involved in analyzing the gravitational waves and understanding their significance.
The catalog revealed 35 new events, including 32 black hole mergers and at least two black hole-neutron star mergers. Several of the resulting black holes that formed from these mergers exceed 100 times the mass of our sun and are classified as intermediate-mass black holes, which have long been theorized by astrophysicists. These most recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observations confirm that this new class of black holes is more common in the universe than previously thought.