10 Years of LVK Black Hole Mergers (IMAGE)
Caption
This chart plots discoveries made by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network since LIGO's first detection, in 2015, of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of colliding black holes. The detections consist mainly of black hole mergers, but a handful involve neutron stars (either black hole-neutron star collisions or neutron star-neutron star collisions).
So far, during the current, fourth science run, the LVK detectors have spotted about 220 mergers, which more than doubles the number (90) found in the first three runs combined. The closest event observed to date, shown in Run 2 and indicated by the down arrow, is a binary neutron star merger known as GW170817, located only 0.13 gigalight-years away (or 130 million light-years).
In this chart, the total masses of the initial objects are represented by size, while the signal strength is indicated by color. The plot demonstrates that over time the gravitational-wave observatories are both finding more black holes and detecting them with higher signal-to-noise ratios, thanks to cutting-edge advancements made to the detectors.
Note that the black hole detections in the latter half of the fourth run are grey and appear to be the same size because these data have not been released in full—with the exception of the event called GW250114. That event, the clearest signal heard by LIGO yet, appears as a bright, orange dot on the chart in the fourth run.
Credit
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC)
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Not for commercial use, reproduce with credits
License
Original content