Gravitational Waves! FROM SPACEEEE!

Dr. Katie Brevik (Carnegie Mellon)

Black holes and stellar remnants are some of the most difficult objects to discover in the Universe because they (mostly) don’t emit light. Luckily, their immense gravity is strong enough to bend space and time — if they orbit a companion, this motion createsripples in space and time called gravitational waves. In this talk I’ll give a light-speed review of general relativity and discuss the discovery of gravitational waves. Then we’ll take it to space with an introduction to LISA, a triangle-shaped spacecraft constellation that may just detect the most distant objects in the universe once it is launched in the 2030s.