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LIGO Scientific Collaboration

@ligo.org
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Official account of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. We detect gravitational waves! Email: questions@ligo.org

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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 17h
Congratulations to collaboration members on winning @rsef-esp.bsky.social prizes José María Ezquiaga Bravo of the Niels Bohr Institute has won the young researcher in theoretical physics award David Keitel and Josep Blai Covas Vidal and of @uib.cat have won the award for best outreach contribution
Universitat de les Illes Balears researchers Josep Blai Covas Vidal and David Keitel holding a copy of Física celebrating the 10th anniversary of the first observation of gravitational waves. David looks very happy, while Josep is more stoic. Credit: A Costa/UIBJose M. Ezquiaga in a dramatic black-and-white portrait. Credit: Jose M. Ezquiaga
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 25/09/2026
The latest issue of the @ligomagazine.bsky.social is now out with all the latest #GravitationalWaves news! Read it for free at ligo.org/wp-content/u... 🔭🧪⚛️🎶
LIGO Magazine Issue 29

A+ bigger beamsplitters: A major upgrade for LIGO's A+ phase, p 18
GWTC-5.0 - the catalogue continues: 161 events added to the collection, p 6
LIGO Virgo KAGRA teamwork: Gravitational-wave autotune, p 8
Sept. 2026 LVK Meeting in Pune: GW research in India, p 11
A decade on... LISA Pathfinder persists in discovery, p 28
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LISA Community @lisacommunity.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
What do black holes and comic books have in common? More than you'd think. 📖 Read it for free: blackholecomicbook.com
A starry space scene with a glowing orange-black figure representing the black hole and its accretion disk, a small character and a floating figure at left, and the text “BLACK HOLES” in orange letters.
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Shane Larson @sciencejedi.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Happy Gravitational Wave Detection Day, the anniversary of #GW150914! 2 black holes, the largest "stellar mass black holes" we had ever detected at that time (36 and 29 solar masses), merged 1.3 billion lyr away! My blog from the announcement in February: writescience.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/t...
writescience.wordpress.com
The Harmonies of Spacetime — GW150914
by Shane L. Larson I have a good friend, Tyson, whom I don’t get to see nearly often enough. We are both privileged to be among the first generation of scientists who will know the Universe by obse…
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Dr Shanika Galaudage @astronerdika.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
OTD 11 years ago we discovered an event that birthed a whole new field of astronomy ✨ Happy Birthday #GW150914! 🥳 #GravitationalWaves #BlackHoles
Image of Figure 1 of the discovery paper showing an eight panel plot with 2 columns and 4 rows. Each row shows the observed gravitational wave signal over time, reconstructed signal against waveform template over time, the residual over time and frequency time graph showing the signal amplitude in colour map. Each column shows the signal observed in each of the LIGO detectors.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/09/2026
If you have a GW150914 birthday cake, please share* with us! Here is a thread of cakes from last year bsky.app/profile/ligo... * Preferably a slice, but photos are OK too
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/09/2026
Happy birthday #GW150914! 11 years ago today, we caught our first gravitational wave, and founded a new type of astronomy A decade later, we now have hundreds of observations! 🔭🧪🎂
Classic plot showing GW150914. Filtered data from LIGO Livingston and LIGO Hanford are shown, both show the characteristic signal of a binary black hole. Crucially, data from the two observatories agree, indicating a real signal.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 07/09/2026
Please remember we are not currently observing, so a lack of alerts does not necessarily mean that the app is not working, nor that the Earth has been shattered. Don't panic
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jorgepullin.bsky.social @jorgepullin.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The Y arm valves were opened and LIGO Livingston enters the commissioning phase for the next observing run. I couldn't find a picture of the Y arm valves, so here's a picture of me inside the Y-end 😀
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Laurence Datrier @asleepywanderer.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I can do simple and detailed! 🧪🔭🐡
A retro "visit LIGO Hanford" poster showing a car along an arm of the LIGO Hanford interferometer, with mountains in the backgroundA realistic digital painting of a sunset with a LIGO Hanford arm in the foreground
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EGO and the Virgo Collaboration @egovirgo.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
EGO’s technical deputy director, Franco Carbognani, accepted the Frontiers of Science Award in Physics on behalf of the Virgo Collaboration, during the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing, China.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 24/08/2026
That would be an intricate signal We can only measure the final moments of a merger, so most of these interactions would be outside of our observing band, unfortunately
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 22/08/2026
We have not yet detected gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars, but this is already telling us something about what they are made from ligo.org/science-summ... #NeutronStarWeek 🧪🔭
ligo.org
Neutron stars: smoother than billiard balls – unfortunately – LSC – LIGO Scientific Collaboration
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 22/08/2026
The 1.7 second delay is consistent with models of gamma-ray burst explosions. Time is needed for the gamma-ray engine to establish itself and for the gamma-ray to escape the surrounding material.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 22/08/2026
Be careful, eating nuclear pasta is a good way of putting on weight
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Dr Shanika Galaudage @astronerdika.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
GW170817 gets the limelight because we got lucky* and saw it's electromagnetic counterpart. But #GW190425 is a pair of neutron stars that really puzzled us because their total mass was much larger than ones we see in our galaxy! #NeutronStarWeek 📸 arXiv:2001.01761 @ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social
Plot comparing the total mass of GW190425 with known binary neutron stars in the Milky Way. The 10 Galactic systems cluster between about 2.5 and 2.9 solar masses, shown by a grey histogram, dashed black distribution, and green individual measurements. GW190425 lies well above them at roughly 3.4 solar masses. This is figure 5 from arXiv:2001.01761
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 19/08/2026
We have tight constraints on the speed of gravity. They should travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. We use the time delay between the signals reaching our various detectors to help localize the source. According to Einstien's special relativity, no information can travel instanteously.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 18/08/2026
That is correct about GW170817 The detectors do need to be sensitive enough to be able to detect the signal We are looking forward to having KAGRA and later LIGO India contribute to localization of signals
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 18/08/2026
Goodnight, sleep well!
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Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
'...– maybe it falls straight through, being so dense, so heavy– falls through the hardwood, through the foundation slab, through the ground beneath, falls through just as if the Earth were cloud- its atoms so loose, so far apart, before the falling in.' #NeutronStarWeek 🧪 🔭 #PoetrySky
cordite.org.au
A little bit of neutron star for your gorgeous décolletage
100 million tons. That’s the mass of a sugarcube-sized pinch of neutron star. Once all the gasses have condensed, climbed the periodic table, collapsed in upon each other, like some taxi-cab flirte…
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Dr Shanika Galaudage @astronerdika.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
We witnessed two neutron stars collide with both #GravitationalWaves & light OTD in 2017: #GW170817 Just 1.7 secs after the merger was saw a gamma-ray burst, and then ~11 hours later astronomers found a new point of light in NGC 4993: the kilonova ✨ #NeutronStarWeek @ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social
Infographic, created by Shanika Galaudage, featuring GW170817, about 130,000,000 light-years from Earth. Two stylised pale-blue neutron stars are shown spiralling together amid blue orbital curves and a purple-white burst. Text reads, “GW170817" and "first neutron star merger observed in both gravitational waves AND light!” An orange handwritten font style note says, “these neutron stars are no more :(”. The background continues a map of the Universe, with dashed, logarithmically spaced distance contours and an orange dot marking the location of GW170817.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 18/08/2026
Very good advice It is ejected material from neutron stars that powers kilonova
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 17/08/2026
Were were only able to localize the source of #GW170817 thanks to the addition of @egovirgo.bsky.social to our network Having at least 3 detectors makes a big difference! bsky.app/profile/egov... #NeutronStarWeek
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 17/08/2026
Can we make #NeutronStarWeek happen? Please share your favourite neutron star-related material (even if it is super dense) 🔭☄️
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 17/08/2026
Happy birthday #GW170817, our first observation of a binary neutron star and first gravitational-wave detection with a multimessenger counterpart www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yt5... 🔭🧪⚛️ #NeutronStarWeek
youtube.com
Discovery Plot: GRB170817A
YouTube video by LIGO Virgo KAGRA
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Christopher Berry @cplberry.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Excited that this paper is finally published! It was super fun to work on doi.org/10.1103/gzrj... 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
doi.org
GW240925 and GW250207: Astrophysical Calibration of Gravitational Wave Detectors
GW240925 and GW250207 are two loud gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole coalescences observed with network signal-to-noise ratios $\ensuremath{\sim}32$ and $\ensuremath{\sim}69$, respecti...
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/08/2026
Additional photo credits to Ingo Peball and Erna Csaszar. Great work everyone!
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 13/08/2026
Yesterday's eclipse captured by our collaboration members in Mallorca The 1919 eclipse was famously used as a test of Einstein's general relativity. We now test it using stronger gravitational fields than the Sun's 📷 D Keitel @dkeitel.bsky.social, A Calafat & J-R Merou
Photo of the total solar eclipse showing the corona around the masked Sun. By Alicia CalafatPhoto of the total solar eclipse, showing the Sun over the ocean, and Mallorca's coastal landscape. By David Keitel
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 11/08/2026
Catch up on 200 years of astronomy breakthroughs as @startswithabang.bsky.social picks his 20 biggest cosmic discoveries of the last 20 decades bigthink.com/starts-with-... 🔭🧪☄️
bigthink.com
The 20 biggest cosmic discoveries of the last 20 decades
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 24/07/2026
We are glad that you appreciate our work!
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/07/2026
Our next LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA webinar will explain cosmological measurements using our #GWTC5 results (paper arxiv.org/abs/2605.27227) 16 July at 14:00 UTC, with the recording on YouTube after Register for free wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi... 🔭 ☄️ ⚛️ 🧪
Webinar

GWTC-5.0: Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion Rate and Modified Gravitational-wave Propagation

16 July 2026 from 14:00 UTC

Background image: An artistic representation of a binary black hole merger by Aurore Simonnet
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/07/2026
Astronomers discover a 'lost world' of black hole mergers: 'It's the astronomical equivalent of uncovering an ancient civilization' www.space.com/astronomy/bl... @robleascijorno.bsky.social reports on our discoveries from #GWTC5 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
An artistic illustration of merging black holes. Inset: Black hole masses in mergers detected in gravitational waves.

Image credit: Robert Lea/LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA/Aaron Geller/Northwestern
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LIGO-India @ligoindia.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
The latest catalogue of gravitational wave discoveries released by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA includes several exceptional events. The event #GW250114 is one such astronomical discovery, strikingly similar to the first ever detection in 2015 exactly ten years ago, but three times brighter
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 10/07/2026
Congratulations to our collaboration member Dr Isobel Romero-Shaw on wining the @royalastrosoc.bsky.social 2026 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship! Her lecture is at the University of Bath in November ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre... 🔭
Portrait of Dr Romero-Shaw. She is smiling.Credit: Royal Astronomical Society/Isobel Romero-Shaw
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 08/07/2026
Our next LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA webinar will our latest #GWTC5 catalog (science summary ligo.org/science-summ...) 9 July at 14:00 UTC, with the recording on YouTube after Register wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi... 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
Webinar
Overview of GWTC-5.0: Introduction/Method/Results
9 July 2026 from 14:00 UTC
Background image: An artistic representation of a binary black hole merger by Aurore Simonnet
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 08/07/2026
Correction: 14:00 UTC (the image has the correct time)
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Laurence Datrier @asleepywanderer.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
I'm looking through the classroom activities page on the @ligo.org website for a talk I'm preparing, and I love that they use this legendary cat picture for Electrostatics (possibly my favourite picture on Wikipedia) 🧪🔭
A screenshot of the LIGO website. There's a table with various topics accompanied with photos. The topic "Electrostatics" had a photo of a tabby cat covered in foam peanuts
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 07/07/2026
Congratulations to Dr Jane Glanzer, winner of the 2025 LIGO Laboratory Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration! Jane is the first winner of the award for both calibration and detector characterization www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/award-e...
Dr Glanzer receiving her Noise Slayer light sabre in her Calibration Wizard hat at the recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA meeting in Pisa.

Image credit: Yumeng Xu
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LISA Community @lisacommunity.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Congratulations to the @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration on the release of their latest gravitational wave catalog. The Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue-5.0 (GWTC-5) includes 161 new events detected between April 2024 and January 2025, further advancing the field of GW astronomy.
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Laurence Datrier @asleepywanderer.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Some recent art I made! Inspired by 19th century astronomy charts (www.rmg.co.uk/collections/...) and Jean-Pierre Luminet's 1978 black hole simulation. 🐡🔭🧪
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 15/05/2026
"Sometimes you need a hammer, sometimes you need a screwdriver, sometimes you need two black holes many times the mass of the Sun" On our latest results with #GW240925 and #GW250207 www.iflscience.com/this-wasnt-r... by @drcarpineti.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
Screenshot of article. It has a headline

“This Wasn't Really Something We Were Expecting To Be Able To Do”: Black Hole Collisions Can Now Be Used To “Autotune” Gravitational Wave Detectors

Below is a graphic of a binary black hole binary sending out gravitational waves
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Christopher Berry @cplberry.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
A wonderful illustration of the value of a network of gravitational-wave detectors The timing information from LIGO Hanford introduces a big shift to the inferred sky position—this shouldn't happen often, but it would make a huge difference if looking for a counterpart to a binary neutron star 🔭☄️
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CosmicRami 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @rami.spaceaustralia.com · 13/05/2026
y'all! Have you seen these gorgeous infographics from @astronerdika.bsky.social @astronerdika.bsky.social @sbisco.bsky.social + LVK collab?! Neat new science on calibrating some of the most sensitive instruments in the world using astrophysical signals as the calibrator! 🔭
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/05/2026
The #GW240925 and #GW250207 paper, describing all the science surrounding these detections, released yesterday arxiv.org/abs/2605.11703 You can learn more about the science in this thread 🔭🧪☄️⚛️ 🧵 bsky.app/profile/ligo...
arxiv.org
GW240925 and GW250207: Astrophysical Calibration of Gravitational-wave Detectors
GW240925 and GW250207 are two loud gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole coalescences observed with network signal-to-noise ratios $\sim 32$ and $\sim 69$, respectively, by the LIGO Hanfor...
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/05/2026
Special thanks to the team at @uofgravity.bsky.social for translating the #GW240925 & #GW250207 infographics into Glaswegian #Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
Weegia adaption of the GW240925 + GW250207 inforgraphic by Karl Toland

The Glasgow dialect is most distinctiveWeegie astrophysical calbiration infographic adapted by Karl Toland

The Glasgwegian dialect mixes Scots and English with its own local vernacular
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/05/2026
The #GW240925 and #GW250207 paper released yesterday arxiv.org/abs/2605.11703 and you can learn more about the science in this thread 🔭🧪⚛️☄️🧵 bsky.app/profile/ligo...
arxiv.org
GW240925 and GW250207: Astrophysical Calibration of Gravitational-wave Detectors
GW240925 and GW250207 are two loud gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole coalescences observed with network signal-to-noise ratios $\sim 32$ and $\sim 69$, respectively, by the LIGO Hanfor...
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 14/05/2026
"On the application of astrophysical signals to gravitational-wave detector calibration" — an artistic interpretation of our latest science with #GW240925 and #GW250207 by @asleepywanderer.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️🐡
A poster in the style of an old Victorian science book showing depicting how we use astrophysical calibration to tune our detectors. The poster shows binary black holes (the source of our signals), illustrations of the gravitational-wave signals, the laser between our mirrors of our interferometer with a scale bar indicating the precision over which they need calibrating (they are really, really, really precise).
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 13/05/2026
These #GW240925 and #GW250207 infographics have been translated into a range of languages by our LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA Collaboration members dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-G260085... 🇪🇸🇩🇪🇬🇷🇮🇳🇮🇹🇯🇵🇵🇱🇵🇹 There are many benefits to being an international collaboration! 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
Portuguese infographicHindi infographicGreek inforaphicJapanese infographic
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 13/05/2026
Data products for our new discoveries #GW240925 and #GW250207 are available from zenodo.org/records/1860... Explore our results to learn more about our science 🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #OpenData #OpenScience
Screenshot of a Jupyter notebook, showing Python code to reproduce one of the plots from the paper, together with discussion of the results and a link to further reading.

The notebooks are included with the data release
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LIGO Scientific Collaboration @ligo.org · 13/05/2026
Autotuning gravitational-wave detectors using the chirps of the cosmos! ⚫⚫🎶🎛️ Meet #GW240925 and #GW250207, two new, LOUD #GravitationalWave detections that have enabled us to use astrophysical calibration to tune our laser interferometers 🖼️ : @astronerdika.bsky.social, @sbisco.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️☄️
The Autotune problem in gravitational waves: understanding astrophysical calibration with music

1. We hear an autotuned recording (detector data) and we want the original voice recording (gravitational wave).
BUT
2. We don’t know the autotune settings (calibration uncertainty).
3. So we use a bunch of trial voice recordings (waveform templates) and apply various autotune settings to them to obtain a set of autotuned recordings.

The best match reveals BOTH the autotune settings AND the original voice recording!

GW240925 and GW250207 Events

GW240925  with component masses of about 9 and 7 solar masses located roughly 1.1 billion light-years away. 

GW250207 masses of about 35 and 30 solar masses located about 600 million light-years away. 

LIGO Livingston and Virgo were online and observing fine, but LIGO Hanford had calibration issues. KAGRA was not observing at the time.The Distorted Recording

Infographic describing gravitational-wave detector calibration. Three panels show:

A compact binary system of two orbiting black holes producing gravitational waves.
A stylized interferometer being stretched and squeezed by passing waves, illustrating calibration and detector response.
A green waveform representing the recorded gravitational-wave signal.

Detectors measure tiny changes in distance, and calibration disentangles the true gravitational-wave signal from distortions introduced by the detector response.More Detectors = Better Localisation

Infographic explaining how adding more gravitational-wave detectors improves sky localisation. On the left, two detectors (Livingston + Virgo) localise a source to a large ring-shaped region on the sky. On the right, adding Hanford creates overlapping rings from different detector pairs (H+L, H+V, L+V), shrinking the possible source location to a much smaller region. 

Astrophysical calibration was needed to use Hanford data
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