Earth recorded a ‘tsunami’ of gravitational waves arriving from space

An international scientific team has revealed the largest number of gravitational waves ever detected, with dozens of new events that have multiplied the record of detections tenfold.

They hope this discovery will help solve some of the most complex mysteries in the universe, including the building blocks of matter and the workings of space and time. These are fluctuations generated in the curvature of space-time that propagate as waves at the speed of light,

The global team’s study, published in ArXiv, performed gravitational effects caused by pairs of merging black holes or neutron stars and black holes crashing together, using the LIGO and Virgo observatories between November 2019 and March 2020.

This brings the total number of detections to 90 after three observation periods between 2015 and 2020.

The new detections come from massive cosmic events, most of them billions of light-years away, hurling waves through space-time. They include 3 merging and probably three collisions between neutron stars and black holes.

Susan Scott, from the Center for Gravitational Astrophysics at ANU (Australian National University) and a co-author of the study, said in a statement that the latest discoveries represented “a tsunami” and they were a “Great step forward in our quest to discover the

Detection has been multiplied by 10

“These discoveries represent a tenfold increase in the number of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since ”, said distinguished Professor Scott.

“We have detected 35 events. That is massive. Rather, we made three detections in our first series of observations, which This is truly a new era for gravitational wave detection and the growing population of discoveries is revealing a lot of information about the life and death of stars throughout the universe. “

“Looking at the masses and spins of black holes in these binary systems indicates how these systems came together in the first place. It also raises some really fascinating questions. For example, did the system originally form with two stars that went through their life cycles together and eventually became black holes? Or did the two black holes come together in a very dense dynamic environment like in the center of a galaxy? “

Scott, who is also a chief investigator at the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said that the continuous improvement of gravitational wave detector sensitivity

“This new technology allows us to observe more gravitational waves than ever. We are also investigating the two mass gap regions of black holes and providing more.The other really exciting thing about constantly improving the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors is that this will bring a whole new range of wave sources into play. gravitational, some of which will be unexpected, “he concluded.

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