Alex Nielsen Colloquium

Wed. Jan. 18 12:30 PM - Wed. Jan. 18 01:20 PM
Location: 3M71

Binary Black Hole Mergers in the first Advanced LIGO Observing Run

The first observational run of the Advanced LIGO detectors saw the first detections of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers. Our search, based on general-relativistic models of gravitational wave signals from binary black hole systems, unambiguously identified two signals, GW150914 and GW151226 and identified a third possible signal, LVT151012, with substantially lower significance. We discuss what can be inferred about the properties of these systems and the implications for future runs.