Abstract
On August 14, 2017 at 10∶30:43 UTC, the Advanced Virgo detector and the two Advanced LIGO detectors coherently observed a transient gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar mass black holes, with a false-alarm rate of in 27 000 years. The signal was observed with a three-detector network matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 18. The inferred masses of the initial black holes are and (at the 90% credible level). The luminosity distance of the source is , corresponding to a redshift of . A network of three detectors improves the sky localization of the source, reducing the area of the 90% credible region from using only the two LIGO detectors to using all three detectors. For the first time, we can test the nature of gravitational-wave polarizations from the antenna response of the LIGO-Virgo network, thus enabling a new class of phenomenological tests of gravity.
- Received 23 September 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.141101
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Focus
Three-Way Detection of Gravitational Waves
Published 6 October 2017
The first simultaneous detection of gravitational radiation by the LIGO and Virgo detectors greatly improves localization of the source and permits a novel test of general relativity.
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