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7:30 pm, Wednesday, February 24th, 2016
Room 1013, Earth Sciences Bldg
2207 Main Mall, UBC
Gravitational Radiation is finally detected
William G. Unruh
University of British Columbia
In Sept 2015 the 2 LIGO observatories observed gravitational
waves emitted during the inspiral and collision of two black holes, each
of roughly 30 solar mass, occurring 1.3 billion yrs ago at a distance of
1.3 billion light years. The energy output during this event was colossal,
roughly equivalent to that of all stars in the universe during the same
period. My talk will discuss this event, explaining what gravitational
radiation is, how it is formed, and how it was measured by LIGO. The talk
is for the general public - no knowledge of gravity, or of lasers, is
assumed.
For more about
the LIGO discovery, go to this resource document.
To learn more about the speaker, please visit his
Wikipedia webpage.
This lecture is one of the PITP's special public events to celebrate the Centenary of General Relativity. You can find the resource material here.
Additional resources for this talk: slides, introductionand
video.
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