OzGrav - ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery

12/06/2026

🌟 Our OzGrav Outreach Ambassador superstar, Dr Christine Lee, has written a fascinating article for The Pursuit exploring how exploding stars may be communicating with us through gravitational waves.

Christine has a wonderful talent for making complex science accessible and engaging. If you've ever wondered how we can "listen" to the cosmos, this is well worth a read.

📖 Read the article: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/exploding-stars-are-trying-to-talk-to-us-through-gravitational-waves

The cataclysmic explosions of dying stars can help us unlock grand mysteries of the universe. Researchers at the University of Melbourne are priming detection tools to make the most of the next one we get

10/06/2026

Congratulations to OzGrav's very own Professor David Blair on being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2026 King's Birthday Honours.

David was recognised for his distinguished service to physics, precision measurement science, gravitational-wave research and scientific education.

A pioneer of gravitational-wave science in Australia, David's decades of leadership, research and mentorship have helped shape a field that is transforming our understanding of the Universe.

We are incredibly proud to celebrate this well-deserved recognition.

👏 Congratulations, David!
https://www.ozgrav.org/awards/ozgrav-congratulates-professor-david-blair-ao-on-kings-birthday-honour

OzGrav is delighted to congratulate Professor David Blair, one of Australia’s pioneering gravitational-wave physicists, on being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours. Professor Blair was recognised for his distinguished service to physics, preci...

01/06/2026

What’s causing some of the Galaxy’s most mysterious repeating radio signals?

A new study by OzGrav PhD student Kovi Rose and an international team of astronomers, published in Nature Astronomy, has linked a rare long-period radio transient to a white dwarf star feeding on a companion star, offering new insights into these unusual cosmic signals.

Read more: https://www.ozgrav.org/news/student-astronomer-discovers-rosetta-stone-for-mysterious-cosmic-signals/

27/05/2026

We’re thrilled to celebrate OzGrav member Dr Kirsten Banks – better known online as AstroKirsten – for being named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list 🎉✨

An astrophysicist, science communicator, lecturer, and proud Wiradjuri woman, Kirsten has built a global audience by making the universe more accessible, exciting, and inclusive – from black holes and cosmic discoveries to Indigenous knowledge of the night sky.

Through her work online, in classrooms, and across major science initiatives, she continues to inspire hundreds of thousands of people to look up and stay curious about the cosmos 🌌

Congratulations, Kirsten – this recognition is so well deserved! 🚀

27/05/2026

Congratulations to OzGrav’s Dr Iris de Ruiter on being awarded a prestigious 2026 Gruber Foundation Fellowship in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union.

Dr de Ruiter’s research explores mysterious radio signals from compact stellar systems, helping uncover new insights into white dwarfs, stellar magnetism, and binary evolution. 🌌

https://www.ozgrav.org/awards/ozgravs-dr-iris-de-ruiter-awarded-prestigious-2026-gruber-foundation-fellowship/

The International Astronomical Union

Congratulations to OzGrav’s Dr Iris de Ruiter, who has been awarded a prestigious 2026 Gruber Foundation Fellowship. Each year, The Gruber Foundation (TGF), in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), funds a US$ 75,000 fellowship programme for promising early-career astronom...

26/05/2026

The black hole drama continues. 🕳️🍿

Astronomers have released the latest “season” of gravitational wave discoveries in the new GWTC-5.0 catalogue — a growing record of black holes and neutron stars crashing together across the universe. OzGrav postdoc at Monash University, Sharan Banagiri, was a key contributor to this release.

These detections come from the global gravitational-wave observatories of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration, which can literally detect ripples in spacetime caused by massive cosmic collisions.

This newest release, Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue GWTC-5.0, is basically the latest season recap of the universe smashing black holes together.

26/05/2026

The latest gravitational-wave catalog from the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration has added 161 new detections, bringing the total number of observed gravitational-wave signals to 390.

“This set of nearly 400 gravitational-wave detections from LIGO and Virgo provides us with a clear indication that the binary black hole mergers we see are forming in several different ways,” said OzGrav’s Dr Sharan Banagiri.

Read more:

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has today released its latest catalog of gravitational-wave detections. The data analysed for this update were collected by the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors and the Virgo detectors. They are the world’s premier o...

20/05/2026

What happens after a star explodes?

An international team from the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA collaborations, including researchers from OzGrav, has completed one of the most sensitive searches yet for continuous gravitational waves from young supernova remnants.

The results are helping scientists get closer to detecting one of the most elusive signals in the Universe.

Read more:

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 completed one of the most sensitive searches yet for continuous gravitational waves from young supernova remnants...

20/05/2026

Astronomers found… nothing. And that’s actually really exciting!

Researchers from OzGrav, working with the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration, went searching for something called continuous gravitational waves.

Unlike the dramatic bursts of gravitational waves created when black holes collide, continuous gravitational waves would be incredibly faint — more like a steady hum from space.

16/05/2026