New announcement of gravitational wave detection

Announcement: New Forums

We are excited to announce the launch of our new forums! You can access it forums.aavso.org. For questions, please see our blog post. The forums at aavso.org/forum have become read-only.

Friends,

I am at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society (San Diego, CA), and had the privilege of attending the announcement of new gravitational wave detection from two black holes merging. The discovery was made by the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration. You can read more abou those detections at:

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160615

I also attended the discussion following the announcement, where future directions of the collaboration were mentioned. The main idea is to improve the sensitivity of the detectors (and add more detectors), making possible to constrain the physical location of the merger. This way, the astronomical community could follow up those events with other ground-based and space-based observatories. I am thinking of our role: In 10 years from now, can you imagine getting a notification with an observing request to follow-up a transient which was detected via gravitational waves?

Best wishes - clear skies,

Stella.