Status of the Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detector

Understand

On September 2015, a century after Einstein's predictions of their existence, the first gravitational waves (GWs) direct detection was performed by LIGO.

• On August 17, 2017, the two Advanced LIGO and the Advanced Virgo interferometers detected a GW produced by two merging neutron stars.
• The subsequent localization of the source in the sky, thanks to the presence of a third detector, led to the detection of the electromagnetic counterpart and follow-up of the event by roughly 70 electromagnetic and neutrino telescopes.
• After the first two data taking runs (O1 and O2), the LIGO-Virgo network detected 11 GWs from 10 binary black holes and one binary neutron star.