LIGO and Virgo announce four new gravitational-wave detections
The following news article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory, in partnership with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. Presently, David Shoemaker, senior research scientist in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as the elected Spokesperson for the LSC. On Saturday, Dec. 1, scientists attending the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop in College Park, Maryland, presented new results from the National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the European-based VIRGO gravitational-wave detector regarding their searches for coalescing cosmic objects, such as pairs of black holes and pairs of neutron stars. The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have now confidently detected gravitational waves from a total of 10 stellar-mass binary black hole mergers and one...