LIGO and Virgo Capture Their Most Massive Black Holes Yet

LIGO and Virgo Capture Their Most Massive Black Holes Yet

3 years ago
Anonymous $UzyKJJH9oy

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ligo-and-virgo-capture-their-most-massive-black-holes-yet/

The alert caught Zsuzsanna Márka’s attention immediately. Whenever the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart Virgo detect a potential gravitational wave event, an automatic notice is quickly dispatched to members of the collaboration.

Soon after receiving the notification for such an event on May 21, 2019, Márka, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, was on the team’s internal Slack channel, sending an excited message to her husband Szabolcs Márka, who also works with the LIGO group at Columbia, and Imre Bartos of the University of Florida.