New gravitational-wave finder scores again

An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars. Credits: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL

Less than four months after the historic first-ever detection of gravitational waves, scientists on a team that includes Penn State University physicists and astronomers now have detected another gravitational wave washing over the Earth. "I would never have guessed that we would be so fortunate to have, not only one, but two definitive binary black-hole detections within the first few months of observations," said Chad Hanna, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy & astrophysics at Penn State and co-chair of the Compact Binary Coalescence Group of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which detected both the first gravitational wave and this new one since beginning observations last fall.

A scientific paper detailing the detection has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. The discovery will be announced during a press conference on June 15, 2016, at 10:15 a.m. PDT (1:00 p.m. EDT) during the American Astronomical Society conference in San Diego, California.

Chad Hanna standing on the roof of the control room of the LIGO gravitational wave detector in Livingston, Louisiana. One of the 4km arms of the LIGO detector stretches into the distance at the top left of the photo. Credit: Penn State University.

Both of the gravitational waves that have been detected were born during the final moments before two massive black holes merged into one. This gravity-driven merger warped space and sent waves speeding outward, making ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Before the recent first detection by LIGO, these waves had not ever been detected on Earth. "We now have far more confidence that mergers of two black holes are common in the nearby universe," Hanna said. "Now that we are able to detect gravitational waves, they are going to be a phenomenal source of new information about our galaxy and an entirely new channel for discoveries about the universe."

Physicists have concluded that the newly detected gravitational-wave event was produced during the final moments of the merger of two black holes whose masses were notably smaller than the masses of the black holes whose merger produced LIGO's first detection. This new merger united black holes with masses 14 and 8 times the mass of the Sun, producing a spinning black hole that is 21 times the mass of the Sun. "It is very significant that these black holes were much less massive than those in the first detection," said Gabriela Gonzalez, professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University, spokesperson of the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), and a former assistant professor of physics at Penn State. "Because of their lighter mass, they spent more time – about one second – in the sensitive band of the detectors. It is a promising start to mapping the populations of black holes in our universe."

The first detection of gravitational waves, which occurred in September 2015 and was announced on February 11, 2016, was a milestone in physics. It confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity, and marked the beginning of the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy. The new gravitational waves were detected on December 25, 2015, at 10:38:53 p.m. U.S. Eastern Standard Time by the twin Advanced LIGO detectors -- one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington, USA.

Aerial view of the LIGO gravitational wave detector in Livingston, Louisiana. Credit: LIGO.

During the merger that produced the new gravitational-wave event, which occurred approximately 1.4 billion years ago, roughly the equivalent of the mass of the Sun was converted into gravitational waves. The detected signal comes from the last 27 orbits of the black holes before their merger. LIGO's Livingston detector measured the waves 1.1 milliseconds before LIGO's Hanford detector. The different arrival times of the signals gives a rough idea of the position of the source in the sky.

"It will be exciting, as we get more detections and do further analyses in the years to come, to disentangle the clues about where these black holes come from," Hanna said. "Unlike the first wave we detected last fall, this new wave had an amplitude that was significantly below the detectors' noise level. We were able to detect this wave because we used the sophisticated techniques that our research field has been developing for decades," Hanna said.

"I was very proud seeing Chad Hanna co-leading the group that found the detection, and being one of the main authors of the fast analysis that will allow multi-messenger astronomy," Gonzalez said. David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said "The Penn State Gravitational-wave Group, led by Chad Hanna, was right in the heart of LIGO’s second detection. The analysis codes developed by Chad and his group identified the gravitational wave within a few minutes after it was detected by the LIGO interferometers. This ability to identify gravitational wave event candidates on short time scales is the key to one of LIGO’s primary science goals in the future -- joint observations of high-energy astrophysical phenomena with LIGO and electromagnetic telescopes."

Hanna said, "Our experience with this new black-hole binary gives us confidence that we can detect -- in near real-time with our present techniques -- systems with very small amplitudes as we expect for binary neutron stars. We now have good reason to believe that the future for gravitational-wave astronomy and multimessenger astrophysics is bright."

The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy, and the Virgo Collaboration, using data from the two LIGO detectors.

In addition to Hanna, other Penn State members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration include Graduate Student Cody Messick, Undergraduate Student Jonathan Wang, Postdoctoral Scholars Duncan Meacher and Sydney Chamberlin, and Computational Scientist.

CONTACTS

Chad Hanna: crh184@psu.edu, (+1) 814-865-2924

Barbara Kennedy (PIO): science@psu.edu, (+1) 814-863-4682

MORE ABOUT LIGO AND VIRGO

-- LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector.

-- Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: 6 from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; 8 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; 2 in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

-- The U.S. National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project.

-- Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German UK GEO collaboration. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Hannover Atlas Cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Several universities designed, built, and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University of New York, and Louisiana State University. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom and Germany, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.