Submitting Campus
Prescott
Department
Physics and Astronomy
Document Type
Article
Publication/Presentation Date
10-6-2017
Abstract/Description
On August 14, 2017 at 10∶30:43 UTC, the Advanced Virgo detector and the two Advanced LIGO detectors coherently observed a transient gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar mass black holes, with a false-alarm rate of ≲ 1 in 27 000 years. The signal was observed with a three-detector network matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 18. The inferred masses of the initial black holes are 30.5 + 5.7 − 3.0 M ⊙ and 25.3 + 2.8 − 4.2 M ⊙ (at the 90% credible level). The luminosity distance of the source is 540 + 130 − 210 Mpc, corresponding to a redshift of z = 0.11 + 0.03 − 0.04 . A network of three detectors improves the sky localization of the source, reducing the area of the 90% credible region from 1160 deg2 using only the two LIGO detectors to 60 deg2 using all three detectors. For the first time, we can test the nature of gravitational-wave polarizations from the antenna response of the LIGO-Virgo network, thus enabling a new class of phenomenological tests of gravity.
Publication Title
Physical Review Letters
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.141101
Publisher
American Physical Society
Required Publisher’s Statement
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Scholarly Commons Citation
Abbott, B. P., AultONeal, K., Gaudio, S., Gill, K., Gretarsson, E. M., Hughey, B., Muratore, M., Pratt, J. W., Schwalbe, S. G., Staats, K., Szczepańczyk, M. J., Zanolin, M., & al., e. (2017). GW170814: A Three-Detector Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Coalescence. Physical Review Letters, 119(14). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.141101
