A little over five years ago, humanity was yet to detect gravitational waves.
Now, observations are pouring in at an astonishing speed. In a six-month span last year, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration detected, on average, 1.5
gravitational wave events per week.
From 1 April to 1 October 2019, the upgraded LIGO and Virgo interferometers detected 39 new gravitational wave events: the shockwaves rippling out across spacetime from massive collisions between neutron stars or
black holes. In total, the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 2 (GWTC-2) now boasts 50 such events.
This has given us the most complete census of black holes in our toolkit, representing a range of black holes that not only had never been detected before, but can reveal previously unplumbed depths of the evolution and afterlives of binary stars.
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