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On November 16, 2015, a team led by scientists from

Aug. 1, 2018 by Devin Jones

On November 16, 2015, a team led by scientists from LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves from merging black holes, using an interferometric analysis of the data available to them. The gravitational wave was first detected on the night of July 30, 2013, at 4:49.30pm. Scientists say this massive merger was caused by a merging black hole that came in at 5.2 billion years old. Two of the researchers describe the result in Phys.org.

"What we need to do is identify the gravitational waves that are coming about from these merging black holes," says LIGO physicist and lead investigator James A. Crenshaw, who has been working on the GWTC-1 data for three years. The gravitational waves are visible in the image below, but they are so small that astronomers haven't yet seen them. The researchers hope to study all of the gravitational waves observed in the GWTC-1 data, to discover more about who caused them.

LIGO and Virgo scientists have now identified and tracked 10 black holes that appeared to have merging black holes. They are led by two of the most recent black hole-related astronomers, Drs. Greg Zangwe and Tom C. Dehn and their colleagues, and by another team, Drs. Daniel E. Luekman and Drs. Robert P. Faucher and Drs. David P. Schmitt and the astrophysicist John C. Schmitt.

For all of this, the results are a good deal more exciting: the merging has been described by various astrophysicists and astrophysicists as a "major event," and the merging could also be a major clue about the fate of the Sun. The gravitational wave is visible in the image below, but its speed in the visible light range is about 2-3 times faster.