New Gravitational wave detection

[John Murrell]

Just announced there has been a third detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO consortium. It was last January and is named GW20170104

 

Appears to be the merger of another two intermediate mass black holes that ‘should not exist’ masses were final mass with errors in the paper.

 

Paper at https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.221101

 

No rough estimate of position given and the time was daylight in the UK so little chance of an optical detection of the counterpart. No detection in Gaia data for that time either but that is not very surprising with Gaia’s scan law.

 

When LSST’s 10,000 alerts a day start we will have a much better chance of imaging the counterpart – meanwhile for amateur astronomers automated searches for FRBs are likely to be a more productive way of making your name.

 

Regards

 

John