Professor Martin Hendry and a Second Neutron Star Merger Candidate

[Roy]

Following on from Professor Martin Hendry's fantastic talk on Wednesday evening, I received the this email yesterday (text below) with the amazing news that they had a second binary neutron star merger event candidate detected on Thursday morning! I would encourage everyone to have a look at the LIGO alerts page from the link in the text.

Roy

Thank you very much for your kind words!  It was a real pleasure to visit, and I'm just sorry it had to be so brief.  My telecon later that evening went well and my onwards travel back to Glasgow all went smoothly on Thursday morning – with the big surprise awaiting me when I landed that we had detected a binary neutron star candidate!  This happened at 08:18 GMT and was observed by the LIGO Livingston and Virgo detectors (Hanford was offline) so was only localised to about one quarter of the sky – making it a stretch for doing EM follow-up.  There have been lots of telescopes doing just that in the past 24 hours, however, so fingers are tightly crossed that we might have seen some form of afterglow.... You can read more about the latest candidate at https://gracedb.ligo.org/latest/ and, of course you can keep up to date on the latest developments via @LIGO and our other social media platforms.

So, yes, I would be delighted to come back again, especially as your 2020-21 season is your big anniversary!  And next time I'll make sure I don't have to rush off so soon...

And, of course , please do share my presentation with anyone who wasn't able to be there.

All the best

Martin