LIGO-Detection Paper

Advanced LIGO has detected gravitational waves from the coalescence of two ``heavy” black holes – source frame masses 36+29 solar masses. This amounts to three discoveries in one:

• The direct detection of gravitational waves

• The observation of a binary black hole merger, agreeing precisely with the strong-field predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity

• The direct observation of binary black holes – indeed, the frequent coalescence of these “heavy” binary binary black holes.

  These black holes are significantly heavier than many people (though not everyone!) expected. This observation challenges and sharpens our understanding of how binary black holes form throughout the universe.

This report only covers some of the first science run – the LIGO Scientific Collaboration continues to analyze the remaining O1 data, and prepare for O2. Based on this event,we expect many more detections over the next year.

For more information, see the links below, and prior posts

• papers.ligo.org: a one-stop location for the latest results!

• LIGO Open Science Center

• Event rates for aLIGO : Rodriguez et al 2015; Dominik et al 2015, recently updated in Belczynski et al 2015 , and the fiducial LIGO event rate review article