Gravitational waves world-first discovery Down Under

A Sydney team was the first in the world to confirm radiowaves from the latest gravitational waves event, resulting from a spectacular neutron star merger that has produced light and radio waves as well as gravitational waves. An Australian group was the first in the world to confirm the radio emission from a gravitational wave event, discovered by collaborators in the United States being announced today. The discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics this year. The discovery of these ripples in space-time, produced by massive, accelerating bodies, like orbiting black holes (which cannot be seen directly) or neutron stars, confirms a prediction made by Albert Einstein in 1916. Now, a group led by Associate Professor Tara Murphy, from the University of Sydney and the Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), has confirmed radio-wave emission from a gravitational wave event discovered on 17 August this year. The results are included in a Science paper published today with co-author institutions including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Oxford University; simultaneously teams from the international science community are publishing related research in other leading journals, demonstrating the second epoch in gravitational waves discovery. Scientists representing LIGO-Virgo, and some 70 observatories today reveal the gravitational waves discovery - the first to produce light and radio waves, not just gravitational waves.