Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, produced when massive objects accelerate, predicted by Einstein in 1916 and first detected by LIGO in 2015. The most powerful sources are colliding black holes and neutron stars, whose final merger sends a chirp of waves outward at the speed of light. Detectors measure distortions thousands of times smaller than a proton. Pulsar timing arrays have since revealed a low-frequency background hum thought to come from supermassive black hole pairs across the cosmos.
Cosmology · Gravitational Waves · Black Holes
Theory assumed colliding compact objects settle into near-perfect circles before merging. Then astronomers reanalyzed a black hole swallowing a neutro...
Astrophysics · Neutron Stars · Nucleosynthesis
Every gold ring and platinum wire on Earth was forged in a collision so violent it shook spacetime. In 2017, astronomers watched two neutron stars mer...
Cosmology · Gravitational Waves · Black Holes
In one release, the number of gravitational-wave detections more than doubled. The fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalog turned a handful of collisions into...
Astrophysics · Black Holes · Gravitational Waves
On September 14, 2015, LIGO recorded the final 0.2 seconds of a collision that had been a billion years in the making. The peak luminosity exceeded th...
Astrophysics · Gravitational Waves · Pulsar Timing
Earth is bobbing up and down in a sea of gravitational waves that stretches from one end of the cosmos to the other. We have no instrument on Earth bi...
Astrophysics · Machine Learning · Survey Astronomy
The Vera Rubin Observatory will produce 20 terabytes of imaging per night. Astronomy still functions as a science only because it has, very quietly, h...