## LIGO: Live Reaction Blog So the eagerly awaited press conference happened this afternoon. It started in unequivocal fashion. > “We detected gravitational waves. We did it!” As rumoured, the signal corresponds to the coalescence of two black holes, of masses 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun. The signal arrived in September 2015, very shortly after Advanced LIGO was switched on. There’s synchronicity for you! The LIGO collaboration have done wondrous things getting their sensitivity down to such a level that they can measure such a tiny effect, but there still has to be an event producing a signal to measure. Collisions of two such massive black holes are probably extremely rare so it’s a bit of good fortune that one happened just at the right time. Actually it was during an engineering test! Here are the key results: Excellent signal to noise! I’m convinced! Many congratulations to everyone involved in LIGO! This has been a heroic effort that has taken many years of hard slog. They deserve the highest praise, as do the funding agencies who have been prepared to cover the costs of this experiment over such a long time. Physics of this kind is a slow burner, but it delivers spectacularly in the end! You can find the paper here, although the server seems to be struggling to cope! One part of the rumour was wrong, however, the result is not in _Nature_ , but in _Physical Review Letters_. There will no doubt be many more! And right on cue here is the first batch of science papers! No prizes for guessing where the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics is heading, but in a collaboration of over 1000 people across the world which few will receive the award? So, as usual, I had a day filled with lectures, workshops and other meetings so I was thinking I would miss the press conference entirely, but in the end I couldn’t resist interrupting a meeting with the Head of the Department of Mathematics to watch the live stream… P.S. A quick shout out the UK teams involved in this work, including many old friends in the Gravitational Physics Group at Cardiff University (see BBC News item here) and Jim Hough and Sheila Rowan from Glasgow. If any of them are reading this, enjoy your trip to Stockholm! Follow @telescoper #blackHole #gravitationalWaves #GW150914 #inspiral #LIGO

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