Helping University and College Teachers

The year 2017 was an absolute thriller for workers in gravitation and astrophysics. There were two announcements in August from LIGO collaborations, which now include the Virgo collaboration in Pisa (Italy), apart from the two at Hanford and Livingston (USA). The first observation was that of another black holes’ merger. The second was the merger of two neutron stars, which was communicated to instruments sensitive to different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum, like radio waves, optical, gamma rays and so on. Amazingly, these instruments were also able to see the event. The combined data, helped in the recovery of more details of the merger. As Stephen Hawking mentioned in his last BBC interview: ‘We are still rubbing our eyes, or rather ears, as we have just woken up to the sound of gravitational waves.’