Gravitational Waves from 2 billion years ago detected

Gravity hunters bag fourth detection

Scientists have detected another burst of gravitational waves coming from the merger of two black holes. The collision occurred nearly 2 billion years ago, but it was so far away that its shockwave has only just reached us. This is the fourth confirmed detection made by an international team investigating Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

 From article, (Scientists have detected another burst of gravitational waves coming from the merger of two black holes.

The collision occurred nearly 2 billion years ago, but it was so far away that its shockwave has only just reached us.

This is the fourth confirmed detection made by an international team investigating Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

Sheila Rowan of Glasgow University, UK, said the team was now on the threshold of a new understanding of black holes.

"It is tantalising to see this new story of how black holes formed and evolved through history of the cosmos," she told BBC News.

"This information is almost within our grasp but we are not quite there yet."

All four collisions detected to date involve black holes of a similar size. This has come as a surprise to many astronomers, including Prof Martin Hendry of Glasgow University.

"They are more massive than we may have previously expected," he told BBC News.

"We were expecting to get some black holes that were 20 or 30 solar masses, but now it's beginning to look as if this is the norm rather than being unusual.

"We can't read too much into just four confirmed events but what we have is starting to hint at pathways to form such systems which might allow us to rule out some models. We can't do that just yet but it would appear that if they are always as massive as this, we may not need too many more [detections before we can draw some conclusions about how black holes form].

The LIGO system is to be upgraded to make it even more sensitive and will be back online in a year's time. And there are plans to add detectors in Japan and India which will enable researchers to detect less violent gravitational distortions and perhaps discover objects and phenomena in the Universe that we cannot yet even imagine.)

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