On Monday, Oct. 16, from 9 a.m.-11:30 a.m., we will host in Ramsey Auditorium a livestream of a Washington, D.C., press conference on new developments in gravitational-wave astronomy.
The conference, hosted by the National Science Foundation, will bring together scientists from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations and representatives from some 70 observatories. Among them is former Fermilab scientist Marcelle Soares-Santos, who will represent the Dark Energy Survey.
The gathering will begin with an overview of new findings from LIGO, Virgo, and partners that span the globe, followed by details from telescopes that work with the LIGO and Virgo Collaboration to study extreme events in the cosmos.
The first detection of gravitational waves, made on September 14, 2015 and announced on February 11, 2016, was a milestone in physics and astronomy; 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. Since then, there have been three more confirmed detections, one of which (and the most recently announced) was the first confirmed detection seen jointly by both the LIGO and Virgo detectors.
The published articles announcing LIGO’s first, second, and third confirmed detections have been cited more than 1,700 times (total), according to the Web of Science citation counts. A fourth paper on the three-detector observation was published on October 6; a manuscript was made publicly available on September 27.