All posts tagged: Transient

Insights from the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue-4.0

Insights from the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue-4.0

Published by skeptic

The Innovation Platform spoke with Viola Sordini, researcher at IP2I Lyon (CNRS) and deputy spokesperson of the Virgo Collaboration within the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network, about the recently released Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue-4.0 (GWTC-4) and its significance for understanding gravitational waves and fundamental physics. The recent publication of the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue-4.0 presents 128 new events detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration from May 2023 to January 2024, marking a significant milestone in our understanding of the Universe. This extensive compilation provides insights into diverse binary systems, enhances our understanding of black hole formation and cosmic evolution and offers an additional method to validate the theory of general relativity. The Innovation Platform spoke with Viola Sordini, researcher at IP2I Lyon (CNRS) and deputy spokesperson of the Virgo Collaboration, to discuss the findings from the catalogue and the implications of advancing our understanding of gravitational waves for fundamental physics and the Universe. Can you provide a brief summary of gravitational waves and explain why understanding them can help us better understand the Universe? The short answer is that gravitational …

Transient astronomy films the universe’s biggest dramas: Best ideas of the century

Transient astronomy films the universe’s biggest dramas: Best ideas of the century

Published by skeptic

Step back 1000 years, look up at the night sky and you might notice some extra dots of light compared with today. Back then, Chinese astronomers called these “guest stars” and believed them to be harbingers of great change. We now know these were likely to have been supernovae – explosions borne from dying stars – and they are one of many happy accidents caught when astronomers were looking at the right spot at the right time. But at the turn of this century, looking for these “transient” events became a tactic in its own right, and it is changing the way we do astronomy altogether. We have since found a myriad of intermittent events throughout the cosmos, lasting from nanoseconds to longer than a human lifetime. “You think the universe has a different range of spatial scales, but it also has these ranges of time scales, and they’re incredibly poorly explored in astronomy,” says Jason Hessels at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Relying on chance to capture these events risks missing much of the action, so astronomers have now automated the process of …