Gravitational waves: The fourth event

A new gravitational wave signal arising from a black hole collision was detected on August 14, this year, and was announced by the National Science Foundation today. A special feature of this observation was that it was observed by the pair of LIGO detectors in Livingston and Hanford in the  U.S.A as well as by the Virgo detector in Pisa. As a result, the location of the event, which involved the merger of two black holes of 25 and 31 solar masses, into one  spinning black hole of 53 solar masses, could be pinpointed 10 times more accurately than it could be using the LIGO detectors alone. The event, designated GW170814 was located in a region of size 60 square degrees which is about 1.8 billion light years away.

Further details are awaited in a forthcoming Physical Review Letters. Meanwhile, here is  a video of a numerical simulation uploaded by the Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Tailpiece : Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne have won the  Physics Nobel prize for 2017 for their work on the Ligo/Virgo  experiment and the detection of gravitational waves. See link. 
03/10/17.

Once again on a Greek island: Corfu

 The first part of July was the beautiful island of Corfu, which may well be the prettiest of the Greek isles. The island boasts of Venetian, Byzantine and Greek ancestry, with monuments from each part casually strewn around in an eclectic mixture.

Here is the monastery Vlacherna, favourite of all post cards and fridge magnets, in the middle of the turquoise bay, with aeroplanes taking off behind it at all times of the day.

The older part of the town lies in between two Venetian forts, the new fort and the old fort.  Winding medieval  streets, and a grand esplanade complete the picture, with numerous sun burnt tourists flocking (and  gawking) everywhere. By the way, there's probably no place where the locals are more kind to tourists, than here.

The Mon Repos palace reposes on top of the Analipsis  hill  of Kanoni, in the middle of a magnificent park, and opposite less than magnificent, but undoubtedly ancient, Greek ruins. It is a beautiful colonial building, and happens to be the birthplace of the Duke  of Edinburgh.

There was much to see, and not enough time. However, this is not the first time this blog has been to Corfu. Readers  in pursuit of completeness may kindly pursue the earlier links, in fact, one, two , three.
May we meet again, Corfu, Αντιο σας.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.