Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellows help detect second gravitational wave event

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, GraWIToN, involving 14 EU-funded researchers, has once more contributed to the discovery of gravitational waves. Following the announcement of the ground-breaking discovery in February that confirmed Einstein's 100 year old theory of relativity, scientists have detected gravitational waves yet again from a second pair of colliding black holes.

This second discovery was made on 26 December 2015 by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.

These waves that are in fact ripples in the fabric of space-time were produced during the final moments of two merging black holes which created a single, more massive spinning black hole that is 21 times the mass of the sun.

credit LIGO/T.Pyle

The MSCA project involved in the discovery is an Initial Training Network and is coordinated by the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), in which 14 young EU-supported researchers are participating. The researchers were involved in the data analysis and the technological development necessary for this much-awaited scientific milestone.

The first detection was an extremely significant moment in physics and astronomy as it confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, and marked the beginning of the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy.

This second detection is also important because it confirms that pairs of black holes are relatively common. It demonstrates, furthermore, that the Gravitational Wave detectors could make it possible to predict how often scientists will 'hear' gravitational waves in the future. The waves themselves are very useful to scientists as they carry unique information on where they came from in the universe as well as on the nature of gravity.

Above all, gravitational waves are providing scientists with a new way to observe some of the darkest and yet most energetic events in our universe.

An article on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters journal in open access.