A global team of scientists, including researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), have detected thirty-five new gravitational wave events, including colliding black holes and neutron stars. The new events, detailed in today’s paper, bring the total number of observed events to 90 since the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of… Read more: 35 new gravitational wave observations bring researchers closer to uncovering the secrets of how stars live and die

For the first time, researchers have confirmed the detection of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star. In fact, the scientists – including those at the University of British Columbia – detected not one but two such events occurring just ten days apart in January 2020. The extreme events made splashes in space that sent gravitational waves rippling… Read more: LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA finds elusive mergers of black holes with neutron stars

UBC Physics & Astronomy researchers, including UBC LIGO team members Jess McIver, Joerg Rottler, and Jeff Young, have been awarded the federal New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2020 Exploration Stream. This funding, each in the amount of $250K, will support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research. The two UBC LIGO projects are among the 7 projects awarded at UBC, and 117… Read more: UBC LIGO researchers receive federal funding to support breakthrough & interdisciplinary research

(via UBC News) The LIGO-Virgo Collaboration, including UBC Department of Physics & Astronomy researchers, has confirmed 39 new gravitational wave event detections, more than quadrupling the total known gravitational wave events from 11 to 50. The results, published in four papers on arXiv, and soon to appear in Physical Review X and other journals, were collected from the first half of… Read more: Scientists detect 39 new gravitational wave events

An international team of researchers, including scientists in the UBC LIGO group, has detected a signal from the most massive black hole merger yet observed. The discovery, outlined in papers published today in Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal, raises a slew of new questions about the nature of black-hole formation, and upends previously held theories about how big holes… Read more: The most massive black hole merger detected

An international team of astrophysicists, including researchers at UBC, have detected the ‘extremely loud’ merger of a black hole with a mystery compact object—the most asymmetric gravitational-wave source yet observed. GW190814, the merger of a heavy black hole with an unidentified compact object about nine times smaller, was reported today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. When stars die, they can collapse into… Read more: Discovery of the heaviest neutron star, or lightest black hole, ever observed

UBC researchers Jess McIver, Evan Goetz, and student Katie Rink visited the LIGO-Livingston detector in Livingston, Louisiana for the LIGO Detector Characterization meeting and noise sprint in January 2020.  

Astrophysicists, including a team at UBC, have observed gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes with distinctly different masses, dubbed GW190412. This discovery gives us a glimpse of subtle harmonics in gravitational wave signals for the first time. These harmonics not only allow improved tests of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they also allow researchers to better resolve how… Read more: Glimpsing harmonics in gravitational waves

Artist’s impression of the binary neutron star merger observed by LIGO Livingston on April 25, 2019. Image credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet.

The UBC LIGO group spans the Faculties of Engineering and Science, with faculty, researcher, and student members from the Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, and Physics and Astronomy departments.