Einstein Telescope approved for ESFRI Roadmap 2021

July 1, 2021

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has included the Einstein Telescope (ET) in the 2021 upgrade of its roadmap. This confirms the relevance of this major international project for a next generation gravitational waves observatory. IFAE researcher Mario Martínez is a member of the Einstein Telescope Steering Committee that prepared the ESFRI candidature.

First observations of ‘mixed’ black hole and neutron star pairs

June 29, 2021

The Virgo, LIGO and KAGRA scientific collaborations today announced the first observation ever of binary systems consisting of a neutron star (NS) and a black hole (BH). The existence of these systems was predicted by astronomers several decades ago, but they had never been observed with confidence, either through electromagnetic or gravitational signals, until now.

Dark Energy Survey (DES) releases most precise look at the universe’s evolution

May 27, 2021

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of more than 7 billion light years. The analysis, which includes the first three years of data from the survey, is consistent with predictions from the current best model of the universe, the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, there remain hints from DES and other experiments that matter in the current universe is a few percent less clumpy than predicted.