The University of British Columbia
Vancouver campus
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
GW190425: detecting the second merger of two neutron stars
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. Read More