Jan 18
2022 Chesley Lecture in Physics
Tue, January 18, 2022
• 7:00pm
- 8:00pm (1h) • On zoom
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Einstein, gravitational waves, black holes and other matters
Gabriela González, Louisiana State University
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. 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. A 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 than 90 discovered signals from mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars - this is the era of gravitational wave astronomy. We will describe the history and details of the observations, and the gravity-bright future of the field.
Event Contact: tfields@carleton.edu