The two LIGO gravitational wave detectors in Hanford Washington and Livingston Louisiana have caught a second robust signal from two black holes in their final orbits and then their coalescence into a single black hole. This event, dubbed GW151226, was seen on December 26th at 03:38:53 (in Universal Coordinated Time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time), near the end of LIGO’s first observing period (“O1”), and was immediately nicknamed “the Boxing Day event”.
In GW151226, the two black holes weighed in at 14 and 8 solar masses and merged at a distance of some 1.4 billion light years from Earth. Get all the info from the LIGO science summary.
Thanks for your continuous support in these exciting times!
Oliver, for the whole Einstein@Home team