Title: Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Abstract: There are only two types of waves that can propagate across the universe: Electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves. Galileo initiated electromagnetic astronomy 400 years ago, by pointing a telescope at the sky and discovering the moons of Jupiter. LIGO physicists and engineers initiated gravitational astronomy in 2015, by observing gravitational waves from colliding black holes a billion light years from Earth. By the 2030s, physicists and astronomers will have opened four gravitational “windows” onto the universe, each covering a different frequency band and using a different type of gravitational-wave detector; and they will be using gravitational waves to observe the big-bang birth of our Universe and the first one second of our Universe's life.

2018-04-19 @5:30 PM

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