Listening to Einstein's Universe: the Discovery of Gravitational Waves

Date: Monday 5th September 2016

Time: 7pm

Venue: the Victorian Bar, Tron Theatre

Speaker: Martin Hendry, University of Glasgow

Gravitational waves are the so-called “ripples in spacetime” predicted one hundred years ago by Albert Einstein, produced by the most violent events in the cosmos: exploding stars, colliding black holes, even the Big Bang itself.   On September 14th 2015 two giant laser interferometers known as LIGO, the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built, detected gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of massive black holes more than a billion light years from the Earth.  This remarkable discovery finally confirmed Einstein’s prediction and has been widely hailed as the scientific breakthrough of the century.

Join Martin Hendry of Glasgow University’s Institute for Gravitational Research as he recounts the inside story of LIGO’s discovery.  Learn about the amazing technology behind the LIGO detectors, which can measure spacetime distortions less than a million millionth the width of a human hair, and explore the exciting future that lies ahead for gravitational-wave astronomy as we open an entirely new window on the Universe.

Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow, where he is currently also head of the School of Physics and Astronomy.   He is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration - an international group of more than 1000 scientists who, with their colleagues in the Virgo Collaboration, in February 2016 reported the historic discovery of gravitational waves.