Northwestern Events Calendar

Jan
17
2020

Colloquium: Shane L. Larson: Probing relics of the Cosmos in low frequency gravitational waves

When: Friday, January 17, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, L211, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Yassaman   (847) 491-7650

Group: Physics and Astronomy Colloquia

Category: Academic

Description:

The most common sources in gravitational wave astronomy all relics of the past history of the Cosmos, whether we are detecting compact stellar remnants, the titanic collisions of black holes at the centers of galaxies, or the relic background of gravitational waves from the earliest moments in the Universe. Gravitational waves encode the history those previous days.

The low-frequency band of the gravitational-wave spectrum, centered around a millihertz, is populated by a rich diversity of strong sources that exist in copious numbers. These include super-massive black hole binaries detectable all the way to cosmological horizon, tens of millions of ultra-compact degenerate binaries in our own Milky Way galaxy, and the capture of stellar-mass objects by black holes in galactic nuclei.

All of these sources will be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), scheduled to launch near the start of the next decade. LISA is a free-flying constellation of spacecraft that operate in concert as a multi-million kilometer armlength interferometer. In this talk we will introduce the LISA configuration and operations, illustrate in several vignettes the astrophysical systems our group at Northwestern works on, and discuss the science that LISA's observations will reveal.

Seminar Speaker: Shane L. Larson, Department of Physics & Astronomy/CIERA, Northwestern University

 Host: 

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Seminar, Colloquium

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