LIGO bags its 4th binary black hole, with the help of Virgo!

Hello Gravity Spy team,

As you may have heard, the LIGO and Virgo detector network has found its first triple-coincident signal! This signal, GW170814, is a binary black hole inspiral, with the masses of the two colliding black holes at about 25 and 30 times the mass of the Sun. Virgo’s observation of this event, and the relative time delay of receiving the signals between the 3 detectors, GREATLY improves our ability to pinpoint the location of the event on the sky, which will help our electromagnetic partners to possibly find a coincident signal with their telescopes. You can find the full paper of this discovery here.

Take a look at the spectrogram from the Virgo detector below? See the signal? If you’re looking at the bright thing just right of center, you’re actually looking at a glitch that occurred right after the signal! Soon, we will be adding data from the Virgo interferometer to the Gravity Spy project, so we can help to better the sensitivity of this instrument, just like what Gravity Spy has been doing for the two LIGO instruments.

Also, we have finally figured out and updated our statistics page with the correct retirement information! Take a gander at our progress here.

-Mike & the Gravity Spy team