Event
Astro Seminar: "The Cosmic Ballet of Black Holes and Gravitational Waves"
Laura Cadonati (Georgia Tech, Center for Relativistic Astrophysics)
One hundred years after Einstein's formulation of General Relativity, Advanced LIGO has detected for the first time gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced by cataclysmic astrophysical event. 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes inspiraled and merged, releasing a power that is 50 times that of the visible universe, in the form of gravitational waves, which reached Earth on the morning of September 14, 2015. In this talk I will describe this discovery, what we have learned from it, and discuss why this is opening a new field of gravitational wave astronomy.