Tue, Sep 17
|Zoom
Rockville Science Cafe
An Introduction to Detecting Gravitational Waves (LIGO Project) With Amber L. Stuver, Ph.D. on Zoom (see event description for the Zoom registration link)
Time & Location
Sep 17, 2024, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Zoom
About the event
Register for the Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwof--urz4sGNfuZBxdV9C024pSKgmxMPLP#/registration
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, ripples on space-time propagating from accelerating masses, in 1916. Fast forward 100 years later, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first detection of a gravitational wave from two stellar-mass black holes that coalesced 1.3 billion years ago. Since then, there have been ~100 detections. This talk will discuss what gravitational waves are and how they are detected.
Amber Stuver, Ph.D., is an associate professor of physics at Villanova University, and has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) since 1999. Before joining Villanova in 2017, she spent a decade working at the LIGO Livingston Observatory and teaching at the Louisiana State University. She earned her PhD (2006) and MEd (2001) in physics from the Pennsylvania State University and her B.S in Physics (1999) from Frostburg State University, MD. Besides teaching and research,…