posted on 2023-05-21, 11:37authored byAbbott, BP, Abbott, R, Karelle SiellezKarelle Siellez, Zweizig, J, Boyle, M, Hemberger, D, Kidder, LE, Lovelace, G, Ossokine, S, Scheel, M, Szilagi, B, Teukolsky, S
We report the observation of a gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar-mass black holes. The signal, GW151226, was observed by the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC. The signal was initially identified within 70 s by an online matched-filter search targeting binary coalescences. Subsequent off-line analyses recovered GW151226 with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 13 and a significance greater than 5σ.