The University of British Columbia
Vancouver campus
The most massive black hole merger detected
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 […] Read More
Discovery of the heaviest neutron star, or lightest black hole, ever observed
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 […] Read More
UBC researchers visit LIGO Livingston
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. Read More
Glimpsing harmonics in gravitational waves
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 […] Read More