“Einstein, gravitational waves, black holes and other matters"
Presented by Gabriela González
Boyd Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Louisiana State University

March 2, 2024
100 Thomas Building
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

More than a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted that there were ripples in the fabric of space-time traveling at the speed of light: gravitational waves. Thirty years ago, when the Ashtekar Frontiers of Science lectures started, scientists were beginning to build detectors of those elusive waves, talking about the incredible technology that was needed. Decades later, on September 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana in the US registered for the first time ever a loud gravitational wave signal traveling through Earth, created more than a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes. Another spectacular signal was detected by LIGO and the Virgo detector in Europe in 2017, produced by the collision of two neutron stars giving birth to a black hole, generating also electromagnetic waves (light!) detected by many telescopes and helping us understand the origin of gold. In only a few years from the first detection, there are now more than 100 discovered signals from mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars - this is the era of gravitational wave astronomy. González will describe the history and details of the observations, and the gravity-bright future of the field.

More info: https://science.psu.edu/frontiers/gabriela-gonzalez-abhay-ashtekar