Exploring the Gravitational Wave Universe: New Discoveries and Plans

On Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 7 pm (PST), Dr. Brian Lantz (Stanford U) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled: 

"Exploring the Gravitational Wave Universe: New Discoveries and Plans"  

in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos (see directions below)   

The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 24th year.   

Measuring gravitational waves is a revolutionary new way to do astronomy.  They were predicted by Einstein but we did not have the technology to find them in his lifetime. In 2015, LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) first detected one of these waves - a tiny ripple in space itself, generated by the collision of two black holes. Since then, LIGO and its international partners have measured nearly 100 signals. What can we learn from these bursts of energy from the mergers of black holes or the collision of two neutron stars? How is it possible to measure a wave which stretches our detector 1000 times less than the diameter of a proton? And what's coming next in our search for these tell-tale ripples in space?  

Dr. Brian Lantz is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford University. He started working on LIGO in 1991 as an undergraduate in Nobel Laureate Rai Weiss's lab at MIT and continued there for his PhD, building high-power interferometers that were prototypes for LIGO. Dr. Lantz is the scientific leader for the Advanced LIGO seismic isolation system, and he is designing new mirror suspensions to upgrade Advanced LIGO.  He loves to work on these amazing machines. 

Foothill College is just off the El Monte Road exit from Freeway 280 in Los Altos.     

For directions and parking information, see: https://foothill.edu/parking/  
For a campus map, to find the Smithwick Theater (Bldg. 1000), see:  https://foothill.edu/map/    

The lecture is co-sponsored by:   

• The Foothill College Science, Tech, Engineering & Math Division   
• The SETI Institute   
• The Astronomical Society of the Pacific  

Past lectures in the series can also be found on YouTube at: http://youtube.com/svastronomylectures  and as audio podcasts at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1805595