The International Collaboration of Ligo-Virgo-Kagra astrophysics in five months – from November 2019 to March 2020 – found 35 gravitational wave events. The frequency of 1.7 events is the largest of the scientists noted. A preprint, which describes the results of observations, is posted on arxiv.org.
During the previous observation period on the gravitational and wave Observatory of LIGO, Virgo – from April to October 2019 – astrophysics were fixed by 1.5 events per week. The total number of gravitational-wave events recorded from 2015 to 2020 is now 90. According to one of the participants in the research team, Professor of the Australian National University Susan Scott, this “tsunami” is a “new era” in the detection of gravitational waves. “For comparison, during the first period of observations, the last four months of 2015-2016, we found only three events,” she notes.
Of the 35 events 32 are the result of mergers of black holes, the remaining three-black holes and much smaller on the mass of objects, probably neutron stars. The most large-scale event GW200220_061928 was the result of a collision of two black holes – the masses of 87 and 61 solar, respectively, was formed a black hole weighing 141 mass of the sun. The first of these objects is also probably the product of the fusion of two black holes – the star needed to form it would form a pair-unstable supernova, which remains no residue. One of the participants in the collision in the GW200210_092254 event was probably a black hole weighing only 2.8 solar – one of the smallest known.