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Gravitational waves

Stellar palaeontology

Nature volume 547, pages 284–285 (2017)Cite this article

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A third gravitational-wave signal has been detected with confidence, produced again by the merger of two black holes. The combined data from these detections help to reveal the histories of the stars that left these black holes behind.

Just after 2 a.m. on 4 January 2017, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO) detector located in Hanford, Washington, registered a tiny ripple in the fabric of space-time. Three milliseconds later, its twin detector, located some 3,000 kilometres away in Livingston, Louisiana, picked up an identical oscillation. Each ripple comprised a stretching and squeezing of space by less than 1 part in 1 billion trillion (1021), and together they constituted the discovery of the gravitational-wave signal GW170104. The details of this observation are reported by Abbott et al. (the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration)1 in Physical Review Letters, adding to a growing set of data that will help astrophysicists to discover the life stories of massive stars.

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Figure 1: Three possible mechanisms for the merger of black holes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Ilya Mandel

  2. kW Engineering, Oakland, 94612, California, USA

    Alison Farmer

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  1. Ilya Mandel
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  2. Alison Farmer
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Correspondence to Ilya Mandel.

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Gravitational waves: Dawn of a new astronomy

https://doi.org/10.1038/534478

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Mandel, I., Farmer, A. Stellar palaeontology. Nature 547, 284–285 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/547284a

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