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390 Gravitational Waves, Solar Storm Watch & White Dwarf Atmosphere
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fifth catalog hits 390 gravitational wave detections, including the loudest signal ever recorded — plus a solar storm watch and JWST's first white dwarf planet atmosphere. Three discoveries reshaping what our instruments can now measure.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Three hundred and ninety gravitational wave detections. That number, released this week in the fifth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalog, marks the point where gravitational wave astronomy stops being about individual events and starts being about populations.
The clearest signal in the catalog came on January fourteenth, twenty twenty-five. GW250114 achieved a signal-to-noise ratio of seventy-six point nine.
Two mergers detected in late twenty twenty-four carry a more unusual signature. GW241011 and GW241110 both show spin patterns that suggest the black holes involved had themselves formed from earlier mergers.
Shifting to near-Earth space. Active Region 4479 on the sun produced an X-class flare on June thirtieth, sending a full-halo coronal mass ejection toward Earth.
The third major development this cycle comes from eighty light-years away. JWST has detected an atmosphere on WD 1856 b, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a white dwarf every thirty-four hours.
The methane abundance in the atmosphere is still being debated. And the migration pathway that delivered WD 1856 b to its current orbit isn't fully pinned down.
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