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Loading contentIn 2015 humanity heard spacetime ring for the first time; in 2017 it saw and heard the same event at once. This is the operational science of the new astronomy — the detectors that feel a merger a billion light-years away, the alerts that race the news around the world, and the telescopes that chase the light before it fades.
The gravitational-wave detectors new to the graph — the operating GEO600 testbed, the proposed next-generation Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, and the space missions DECIGO, Taiji, and TianQin.
6 entriesHow gravitational waves are caught, from ground and space laser interferometry to galaxy-sized pulsar timing arrays.
3 entriesThe compact-binary mergers that ring spacetime — binary black holes, binary neutron stars, and black hole–neutron star mergers.
3 entriesObserving a source in more than one messenger at once — gravitational waves with light, neutrinos, gamma rays, radio, and optical.
5 entriesThe race from alert to counterpart — localization, counterpart search, rapid response — and the skymaps, waveforms, and catalogs it yields.
7 entriesHow gravitational-wave candidates reach the world in seconds — the LVK public alerts and SCiMMA.
2 entriesThe merger of two black holes spiralling together — the most common gravitational-wave source detected, and usually a purely gravitational event with no light. The first ever direct detection, in 2015, was of such a merger over a billion light-years away.
The merger of two neutron stars — a gravitational-wave source that also lights up across the electromagnetic spectrum, producing a short gamma-ray burst and a kilonova. The 2017 event GW170817 was seen in both gravitational waves and light, founding multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves.
The merger of a black hole with a neutron star — the third class of compact-binary merger, first confidently detected in gravitational waves in early 2020. Whether it produces light depends on whether the black hole tears the neutron star apart before swallowing it.
Each detector, detection method, source class, alert system, channel, follow-up stage, and data product is a first-class knowledge-graph entity resolved through the Scientific Data Engine, reusing the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors and the LISA concept, the gravitational-wave, multi-messenger, and neutrino methods, the transient classes, the alert systems, the standard-siren distance indicator, and the bands already in the graph. Curated from the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration, NASA, and ESA. Proposed detectors are stated as such. See source quality.