New Observing run at Virgo and LIGO

Written by katrinlink on 26th March 2019. Posted in

Rear-side view of a suspended mirror. Image credit: EGO/Virgo Collaboration/Perciballi.

The Virgo and LIGO detectors are ready to start the new Observing run called O3, lasting a whole year. The hunt for gravitational waves is set to start on April 1^st when the European Virgo detector, based in Italy at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), and the LIGO twin detectors, located in the state of Washington and Louisiana (USA), will start to take data becoming together the most sensitive gravitational wave observatory to date.

During a one-year period the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations will register science data continuously, and the three detectors will operate as a global observatory. Since August 2017, the end of the second observation run O2, the two collaborations have intensively worked on their interferometers to improve the sensitivity and reliability. Scientists have also improved their offline and online data analysis and developed further the procedures for releasing Open Public Alerts: these will within minutes notify the physics and astronomy community when a potential gravitational-wave event is observed.

The scientific output of observation run O3 is expected to be tremendous and it will potentially reveal new exciting signals coming from new sources.

Please find more information and the full press release on the website: http://www.virgo-gw.eu/O3/start