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Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity produced by some of the most violent events in the cosmos: from colliding black holes and exploding stars to the Big Bang itself. In Sep 2015 the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration made the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves, from the collision of two stellar mass black holes more than a billion light years away, observed by the twin LIGO laser interferometers in the US - the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built.
This ground-breaking discovery resulted in the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics, but it was just the beginning. As LIGO and Virgo have opened an entirely new window on the Universe, the number of gravitational-wave detections has swelled to 50 in just five years. The newly-published catalog of these events is driving exciting new discoveries in astrophysics, fundamental physics and cosmology - with the promise of many more detections to come in the next few years as the global network of ground-based detectors reaches its design sensitivity and expands to include the KAGRA and LIGO India detectors.
In this seminar, join Martin Hendry as he takes a whistle-stop tour through the first five years of gravitational-wave astronomy, highlighting the impressive range of scientific discoveries to date, the remarkable technology that has made these discoveries possible, and the extremely bright future for this new field over the next decade. |