LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Autotuning gravitational-wave detectors using the chirps of the cosmos! ⚫⚫🎶🎛️ Meet #GW240925 and #GW250207, two new, LOUD #GravitationalWave detections that have enabled us to use astrophysical calibration to tune our laser interferometers 🖼️ : @astronerdika.bsky.social, @sbisco.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

The weighted stack we built is mounted on the test stand and we are doing fine adjustments of its position using the FARO laser tracker. @ LIGO - Livingston

🔭 Latest updates on our observing plans: Our next observing period (IR1) will start early 2027. LIGO and @egovirgo.bsky.social will participate, potentially starting with two of the three detectors. KAGRA will join later in the run as available More updates: observing.docs.ligo.org/plan/

🛰️ A decade after LISA Pathfinder, its data continues to support new research and strengthen the foundations for LISA. 🎉 Mark the anniversary by reading the LPF article in the latest issue of the LIGO Magazine @ligomagazine.bsky.social: ligo.org/wp-content/u... #LPF10anniversary #LISAMission

How do we get our mirrors their shiniest? A new video from our @ozgrav.bsky.social colleagues looks at the research into our mirror coatings www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOav... 🧪⚛️🔭

Lots of great research was presented at our recent Collaboration meeting. Special congratulations to our poster prize winners! 👨‍🔬 Avanish Kulur Ramamohan (Australian National University) 👨‍💻 Ananya Anandharaman (@uofgravity.bsky.social) 👩‍🏫 Ashika Achuthankutty (University of Szeged/HUN-REN Wigner RCP)

Congratulations to collaboration members on winning @rsef-esp.bsky.social prizes José María Ezquiaga Bravo of the Niels Bohr Institute has won the young researcher in theoretical physics award David Keitel and Josep Blai Covas Vidal and of @uib.cat have won the award for best outreach contribution

The latest issue of the @ligomagazine.bsky.social is now out with all the latest #GravitationalWaves news! Read it for free at ligo.org/wp-content/u... 🔭🧪⚛️🎶

What do black holes and comic books have in common? More than you'd think. 📖 Read it for free: blackholecomicbook.com

Happy Gravitational Wave Detection Day, the anniversary of #GW150914! 2 black holes, the largest "stellar mass black holes" we had ever detected at that time (36 and 29 solar masses), merged 1.3 billion lyr away! My blog from the announcement in February: writescience.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/t...

OTD 11 years ago we discovered an event that birthed a whole new field of astronomy ✨ Happy Birthday #GW150914! 🥳 #GravitationalWaves #BlackHoles

The Y arm valves were opened and LIGO Livingston enters the commissioning phase for the next observing run. I couldn't find a picture of the Y arm valves, so here's a picture of me inside the Y-end 😀

EGO’s technical deputy director, Franco Carbognani, accepted the Frontiers of Science Award in Physics on behalf of the Virgo Collaboration, during the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing, China.

We have not yet detected gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars, but this is already telling us something about what they are made from ligo.org/science-summ... #NeutronStarWeek 🧪🔭

GW170817 gets the limelight because we got lucky* and saw it's electromagnetic counterpart. But #GW190425 is a pair of neutron stars that really puzzled us because their total mass was much larger than ones we see in our galaxy! #NeutronStarWeek 📸 arXiv:2001.01761 @ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social

'...– maybe it falls straight through, being so dense, so heavy– falls through the hardwood, through the foundation slab, through the ground beneath, falls through just as if the Earth were cloud- its atoms so loose, so far apart, before the falling in.' #NeutronStarWeek 🧪 🔭 #PoetrySky

We witnessed two neutron stars collide with both #GravitationalWaves & light OTD in 2017: #GW170817 Just 1.7 secs after the merger was saw a gamma-ray burst, and then ~11 hours later astronomers found a new point of light in NGC 4993: the kilonova ✨ #NeutronStarWeek @ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social

Can we make #NeutronStarWeek happen? Please share your favourite neutron star-related material (even if it is super dense) 🔭☄️

Excited that this paper is finally published! It was super fun to work on doi.org/10.1103/gzrj... 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

Catch up on 200 years of astronomy breakthroughs as @startswithabang.bsky.social picks his 20 biggest cosmic discoveries of the last 20 decades bigthink.com/starts-with-... 🔭🧪☄️

Our next LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA webinar will explain cosmological measurements using our #GWTC5 results (paper arxiv.org/abs/2605.27227) 16 July at 14:00 UTC, with the recording on YouTube after Register for free wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi... 🔭 ☄️ ⚛️ 🧪

Astronomers discover a 'lost world' of black hole mergers: 'It's the astronomical equivalent of uncovering an ancient civilization' www.space.com/astronomy/bl... @robleascijorno.bsky.social reports on our discoveries from #GWTC5 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

The latest catalogue of gravitational wave discoveries released by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA includes several exceptional events. The event #GW250114 is one such astronomical discovery, strikingly similar to the first ever detection in 2015 exactly ten years ago, but three times brighter

Congratulations to our collaboration member Dr Isobel Romero-Shaw on wining the @royalastrosoc.bsky.social 2026 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship! Her lecture is at the University of Bath in November ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre... 🔭

Our next LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA webinar will our latest #GWTC5 catalog (science summary ligo.org/science-summ...) 9 July at 14:00 UTC, with the recording on YouTube after Register wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi... 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

Congratulations to Dr Jane Glanzer, winner of the 2025 LIGO Laboratory Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration! Jane is the first winner of the award for both calibration and detector characterization www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/award-e...

Congratulations to the @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration on the release of their latest gravitational wave catalog. The Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue-5.0 (GWTC-5) includes 161 new events detected between April 2024 and January 2025, further advancing the field of GW astronomy.

"Sometimes you need a hammer, sometimes you need a screwdriver, sometimes you need two black holes many times the mass of the Sun" On our latest results with #GW240925 and #GW250207 www.iflscience.com/this-wasnt-r... by @drcarpineti.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️☄️

A wonderful illustration of the value of a network of gravitational-wave detectors The timing information from LIGO Hanford introduces a big shift to the inferred sky position—this shouldn't happen often, but it would make a huge difference if looking for a counterpart to a binary neutron star 🔭☄️