Indirect Detection of Gravitational Waves

Update: it turns out that this was a false alarm, but only a year later we did in fact discover gravitational waves!

My last post talked about the speculation over the weekend, and it turns out that when there's speculation of a discovery from the physics and astronomy community, there's usually some truth. There are too many graduate students wanting to sound cool to their friends by letting the cat out the bag!

The details of the discovery are laid out in a good BBC article, and, for the more scientific minded, a blog post by Sean Carroll.

Now, with extra material to add to the growing list of evidence, I hope the first direct detection from a gravitational wave comes in the next few years courtesy of Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, KAGRA and GEO-HF.