OzGrav

  • Home
  • About
    • Vision & Mission
    • Join OzGrav
    • Mental Health and Wellbeing
    • Getting started in OzGrav
    • Funding Opportunities
    • Diversity and Inclusion
    • Code of Conduct
    • OzGrav Mentoring Program
    • Nodes & Partners
    • Facilities & Capabilities
    • Reports >
      • Annual Reports
      • Industry Success Stories
      • Strategic Plan
    • Member resources
  • Our People
    • Chief Investigators
    • Partner Investigators
    • Associate Investigators
    • Postdocs and Students >
      • Faces of OzGrav
    • Professional & Outreach staff
    • Governance Advisory Committee
    • Scientific Advisory Committee
    • Executive Committee
    • Equity & Diversity Committee
    • Early Career Researcher Committee
    • Professional Development Committee
    • Research Translation Committee
    • OzGrav Alumni
  • Research Themes
    • Instrumentation
    • Data/Astro
  • Education and Outreach
  • Events
    • OzFink workshop 2023
    • 2022 OzGrav ECR Workshop and Annual Retreat
    • Upcoming and Past Events
  • News/Media
    • News
    • Newsletter
    • How to write a research brief
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision & Mission
    • Join OzGrav
    • Mental Health and Wellbeing
    • Getting started in OzGrav
    • Funding Opportunities
    • Diversity and Inclusion
    • Code of Conduct
    • OzGrav Mentoring Program
    • Nodes & Partners
    • Facilities & Capabilities
    • Reports >
      • Annual Reports
      • Industry Success Stories
      • Strategic Plan
    • Member resources
  • Our People
    • Chief Investigators
    • Partner Investigators
    • Associate Investigators
    • Postdocs and Students >
      • Faces of OzGrav
    • Professional & Outreach staff
    • Governance Advisory Committee
    • Scientific Advisory Committee
    • Executive Committee
    • Equity & Diversity Committee
    • Early Career Researcher Committee
    • Professional Development Committee
    • Research Translation Committee
    • OzGrav Alumni
  • Research Themes
    • Instrumentation
    • Data/Astro
  • Education and Outreach
  • Events
    • OzFink workshop 2023
    • 2022 OzGrav ECR Workshop and Annual Retreat
    • Upcoming and Past Events
  • News/Media
    • News
    • Newsletter
    • How to write a research brief
  • Contact Us

Blurry black hole has scientists abuzz

12/4/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Ripples of excitement spread through the world of science this week as astronomers revealed the first ever images of a black hole, created using reams of telescope data by MIT's Dr Katie Bouman.

Black holes must rate as one of our Universe's most mysterious phenomena - colossal, monstrous objects that devour any matter and light that dares get too close.

The images show "light swirling around the event horizon of a black hole right before falling into it, never to be seen again", UWA's Teresa Slaven-Blair told the AusSMC. "It’s this evidence of light being removed from the Universe that is so amazing."

Monash University's Professor Ilya Mandel says that this particular black hole is in Messier 87, a galaxy in the nearby Virgo cluster, and that it weighs "a whopping 6 billion times the mass of the Sun". It lives "more than 50 million light years away", he added.

So, how do you snap something in a galaxy far, far away?

Swinburne University's Dr Adam Deller says the team behind the image used radio telescopes thousands of kilometres apart and lined up their signals with extraordinary precision, "to around a millionth of a millionth of a second".

That allowed them "to make phenomenally sharp images – if your digital camera was this good, you could take a photo of a person hundreds of kilometres away and make out individual strands of hair on their head," he said. "They used this capability to capture the shadow that a supermassive black hole casts – it’s the first time astronomers have ever really 'seen' a black hole."

Curtin University's Professor Steven Tingay explained the significance of the images - confirmation of Einstein's theory of General Relativity:

"For decades, we have been studying black holes but could only indirectly see the effects of their extreme masses and gravitational fields," he said. "The images show, for the first time, the point close to the black hole from which nothing can escape, even light - the so-called event horizon...confirming the predictions of General Relativity."

"Einstein’s theory passes yet another test," confirmed OzGrav's Dr Daniel Reardon.
 
"It's a monster, but a very law-abiding one, precisely following the rules laid out by General Relativity," said Professor Mandel.

Read Professor Alister Graham's article in The Conversation: Observing the invisible: the long journey to the first image of a black hole.
0 Comments

big milestones for OzGrav-UWA's low latency pipeline SPIIR!

11/4/2019

0 Comments

 
Congratulations to Prof Linqing Wen, Dr Qi Chu and the group at UWA, as their SPIIR pipeline officially joins the LIGO-Virgo automatic public alert processing! The SPIIR pipeline also reached another major milestone this week, as it detected the first binary black hole candidate from the LIGO-Virgo 3rd observating run.

​SPIIR is an online low-latency real-time search pipeline to detect binary mergers from ground-based detectors. Wen's group harnesses the computational efficiencies of parallel processing using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in order to make the detections as fast as possible. This is especially important for mergers that produce electromagnetic radiation that can be observed by telescopes.  
Picture
Prof Linqing Wen, Dr Qi Chu and the UWA team celebrating SPIIR's detection of the first binary black hole candidate from LIGO-Virgo's 3rd observing run
0 Comments
         


    OzGrav News


    Archives

    March 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    February 2016

    Categories

    All
    Event
    Media

      Keep up to date with ozgrav news and events

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    RSS Feed

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
We acknowledge and pay respects to the Elders and Traditional Owners of the land on which our six Australian nodes stand

​© 2022   The ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational  Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
Banner images: An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars.  Credits: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL
Picture