Description
The LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (LVK) collaborations have announced the detection of over 260 binary black hole signals. Each one encodes information about the masses and spins of merging black holes. In this talk, I describe several highlights from this black-hole haul. First, using the loudest event, GW250114, we experimentally verified Hawking’s famous area law, which predicts that the surface area of a merger remnant black hole must exceed the sum of the areas of its parent black holes. Second, we observed a gap in the distribution of black-hole masses, from which we can learn about the nuclear physics of pair instability supernovae. Finally, the discovery of distinctive clusters in the space of binary black-hole parameters suggests the presence of multiple sub-populations––each shaped by different binary physics.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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