News
John Whelan

According to scientists from across the globe—including those working on the project from RIT—this observing run by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration features upgraded instruments, new and even more accurate signal models, and more advanced data analysis methods.

Scientists on the hunt for a previously undetected type of gravitational waves believe they are getting close and have refined techniques to use in upcoming observational runs. Researchers from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration outlined the most sensitive search to date for continuous gravitational waves from a promising source in a paper recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Numerous Rochester Institute of Technology faculty, professors emeriti, and postdoctoral researchers were recognized as top-cited scientists in their fields, according to a Stanford University study published by Elsevier.

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration unveiled several studies that shed important new light on the nature of gravitational waves. They include a “census” of gravitational wave events to date and a new catalog of results from the second half of its third observing run.

For the first time, scientists detected gravitational waves caused by mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Researchers from RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) helped identify key characteristics about the merger events.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration recently announced the discovery of GW190521, the most massive gravitational wave binary observed to date, and Rochester Institute of Technology scientists played an important role in identifying and analyzing the event.

The Nobel Prize-winning project that hunts for gravitational waves— ripples in space and time—is about to begin the longest and most sensitive observational run to date. And several RIT researchers are preparing to pore over the new data to help uncover some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.