2017 October 16
At long last, we can talk about what we’ve been up to for the past two months! On August 17th, Advanced LIGO detected a burst of gravitational waves consistent with a merger of two neutron stars — different than the previous events, which we believe to have come from black holes. The key difference is that while we don’t expect the black hole events to produce detectable light, we do expect to be able to detect light when neutron stars merge. And boy, did we. (And so did a lot of other folks!) Our team at Harvard put together a website summarizing the eight papers we wrote over the past two months: kilonova.org. Check it out!