Department Colloquium |
Highlights from Recent LIGO and Virgo Observations

Following the first Advanced LIGO data run (O1) in fall 2015, which included two definitive gravitational wave discoveries of binary black hole mergers, LIGO commissioners spent much of 2016 working to improve detector sensitivity, with mixed success. Data taking resumed with the start of the O2 run near the end of 2016 and continued through the summer of 2017, yielding additional discoveries. For the last several weeks of the O2 run, the European gravitational wave detector, Virgo, also collected data in parallel, providing not only independent corroboration of detection, but also dramatically improving source localization via triangulation across the Earth's surface. Highlights from early analysis of the O2 observations will be presented.