<i>The gravitational observatories LIGO and Virgo detected a total of 39 gravitational events from April to September. That makes the number of known gravitational waves a nice round 50.</i>

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We first detected gravitational waves in 2015. Since then we can be sure that spacetime does wobble because of the echoes of the ultimate extreme collisions such as the collisions of black holes or neutrons stars.

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Recently, teams from the American gravitational observatory LIGO and the European Virgo published catalogs of their newest catches. These come from the third series of gravitational wave observations called O3a. These observations took place between the 1st of April and the 1st of October 2019. During that time the gravitational observatories detected a total of 39 new gravitational events – more than one per week. Together with the 11 we knew of before this makes a total of 50 gravitational events.

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The newly created catalog of gravitational events OC3a is anything than boring. It includes several unique detections that increase our understanding of black holes and neutron stars. In it, you can find the gravitational screeches of both the largest and smallest stellar-size black holes we have seen produce gravitational waves. Their masses correspond to 150 and 3 Suns respectively. You can also find mergers of two very different black holes as well as several black holes with very unique rotations.

As Jacob Lange from Brown University says – these are much more complex events than we thought. The Universe is showing itself at its most fascinating. We can learn many interesting things about physics and astrophysics from gravitational wave detections. As the catalog of gravitational events grows we will get a better understanding of the population of black holes and neutron stars in the Universe.

The larger number of known gravitational events is starting to allow us to compare the detections to our theoretical models. While the observations are still quite expensive they are the only way we can compare our theoretical models to reality as creating black holes or neutron stars is impossible here on Earth.

<h4>Sources:</h4>
* https://www.rit.edu/news/ligo-and-virgo-announce-39-new-gravitational-wave-discoveries-during-first-half-third

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