LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA GWTC-5.0 gravitational-wave catalog reaches 390 detections
Astronomers can now study black hole collisions as a population, not rare one-off events. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration released GWTC-5.0, adding 161 new gravitational-wave detections and bringing the total to 390 since the first signal in 2015. The data runs through January
Astronomers can now study black hole collisions as a population rather than a handful of rare events, and that shift is reshaping what gravitational-wave science can answer. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has released GWTC-5.0, the latest version of its gravitational-wave transient catalog. The update adds 161 new detections recorded during the O4b observing run between April 2024 and the end of January 2025. With these additions, the total number of confirmed events since the first historic detection in 2015 reaches 390. The growth matters because individual detections tell you about single mergers, but a large catalog lets researchers map how black holes and neutron stars form, how often they collide, and how their masses are distributed across the universe. Each entry is a collision of extreme objects, often hundreds of millions to billions of light-years away, captured as ripples in spacetime passing through Earth. One signal in the new set, GW250114, stood out for its clarity: two black holes of nearly identical mass, roughly 32 and 34 times that of the Sun, merging more than a billion light-years from Earth. According to reporting from LIGO Caltech and MIT, the catalog now more than doubles the detections available just two years ago, a pace that turns gravitational-wave astronomy from a series of milestones into a steady stream of data.