An international team of scientists from the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA collaborations, including researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has shown for the first time that gravitational waves, ripples in space and time produced by some of the most violent events in the Universe, such as the collision of two black holes, can be used to measure and correct the calibration of the detectors that observe them.

The ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the ANU Institute for Space is partnering with NASA as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon as part of the Artemis II mission – the space agency’s first crewed mission beyond Earth’s orbit in more than 50 years.

One of the most powerful black holes in the universe is belching out gas at speeds of up to 10,000 kilometres per second, making its estimated mass more than 10 times lower than first thought.