Gravitational-wave detector network restarts fourth observing run
O4b to start on 10 April 2024
Next week, the LIGO and Virgo detectors will resume their observing campaigns, which promise to collect more than 200 gravitational-wave events by the end of this current observing run (O4) in early 2025. Astronomers also hope that new multi-messenger events will be detected. Multi-messenger events are those observed both in gravitational and electromagnetic waves, and can be further followed up by other telescopes.
“Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Hannover and Potsdam have made key contributions to the detectors and the analysis of the data they provide,” says Karsten Danzmann, Deputy Managing Director at the AEI and Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics at Leibniz University Hannover. “Together with their LIGO colleagues, they have improved the laser sources used since the start of O4. They have also improved their data-analysis tools for O4 so that black-hole and neutron-star properties can be extracted more accurately and much faster than before.”
