GW170817

Common card · No. 212860

GW170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating within the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993, about 130 million light-years away. The wave was produced by the last moments of the inspiral of a binary pair of neutron stars, ending with their merger. It is the first GW detection to be definitively correlated with any electromagnetic observation. Unlike the five prior GW detections—which were of merging black holes and thus not expected to have detectable electromagnetic signals—the aftermath of this merger was seen across the electromagnetic spectrum by 70 observatories on 7 continents and in space, marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. The discovery and subsequent observations of GW170817 were given the Breakthrough of the Year award for 2017 by the journal Science. GW170817 had an audible duration of approximately 100 seconds and exhibited the characteristic intensity and frequency expected of the...

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