PhD students from the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy have released a new app to encourage members of the public to stay up to date with new gravitational wave events in near real time.
Chirp, designed for use on mobile phones, displays the latest alerts from Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory/Virgo about a possible new gravitational wave. For every new and previous alert you can look up preliminary information about the source of the event, for example whether the signal indicates a black hole collision, or merging neutron stars.
These detections are made by an international team of scientists, including those from the University of Birmingham using the two LIGO detectors in the USA and the VIRGO detector in Italy. The LIGO detectors are the same detectors that won the Nobel prize for Physics in 2017. Along with VIRGO they made a direct observation of a neutron star collision through gravitational waves which started the era of multi-messenger astronomy.
With the start of the third observing run, these gravitational wave events are being released for the first time on public alerts allowing anyone to join us on our journey to discover more about the universe.
Then Postgraduate student, now research fellow Sam Cooper explained his idea for making the app.
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