Editorial – 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics to Gravitational Waves
On Tuesday the 3th of October, at least the several hundreds members of LIGO & VIRGO collaboration where anxiously waiting for the start of the streaming from the Swedish Academy of Science, around 11:30 CET, to follow the attribution of the Nobel Prize for Physics.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 awarded to LIGO collaboration
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to
Rainer Weiss, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to
Barry C. Barish, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and
Kip S. Thorne, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration
“for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”
VIRGO and LIGO together, in quest of gravitational waves
Cascina, 4 August 2017 – On Tuesday August 1st at 10 UCT the LIGO and VIRGO interferometers officially started taking data jointly.
Two perspectives justify the interest of international physics community on this date, the first concerns the conclusion of the construction and the start of operations of the European detector VIRGO, the second is the beginning of the systematic exploration of the Universe with the global network of new generation interferometers.
LIGO Detected Primordial Black Holes?
In September 2015, gravitational waves (GWs) were detected for the first time by the LIGO detectors, the two laser interferometers in the United States. It was found that detected GWs originate from the coalescence of two black holes (BHs) in a binary, each weighing about 30 times the mass of the Sun (30 solar mass). Although there have been indirect observations of BHs in the X-ray binaries, their masses are at most 15 solar masses.
Editorial – The wave of the century
With the announcement, on 11 February 2016, of the first detection ever of a gravitational wave by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations, a New Astronomy, based on listening to the space-time vibrations, was born.
This long-awaited wave, 100 years after the theoretical prediction by Albert Einstein and 50 years after the first experimental efforts, arrived on Earth on 14 September 2015 and was finally perceived by humans with very smart “microphones”.
Gravitational waves are coming closer
The new Advanced Virgo interferometer laser beam injection system was switched on on Friday, September 26th 2014 at EGO, the European Gravitational Observatory.
The big interferometers, built to detect gravitational waves for the first time, almost one century after Einstein announced their existence in 1916, are being improved.
On the Earth, there are only four such giant interferometers, with arms up to 4km long: Virgo, near Pisa; GEO600, near Hannover; and the two LIGO interferometers, in Louisiana and Washington State…
