Spacepoint: Neutron Stars & Black Holes

SATURDAY MAY 10TH | 6-9PM | PIONEER

Dr Michael Landry, Caltech, LIGO Observatory Head, takes us on a journey through the emerging science of Black Holes, Neutron Stars and Gravitational Waves!

Every five minutes, somewhere in the known universe, two closely-spaced black holes spiral toward one another and collide in an astrophysical event of unimaginable power. For a brief moment,  collisions of these spacetime behemoths, each weighing somewhere between a few-to-hundreds of times the mass of our sun, outshine all the stars in the known universe.  Astonishingly, none of this energy is visible to us as light, or any other electromagnetic wave. Instead, it is emitted as warpages in space and time, called gravitational waves.

In this talk, aimed squarely at the general public, we describe the nascent field of gravitational wave astronomy, currently less than a decade old. Beginning with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and his prediction of gravitational waves as the force-carrier for gravity, we describe the large-scale detectors created to find these waves and the astonishing early discoveries and growing realization that the universe is teeming with them. LIGO and Virgo observatories have detected nearly 300 events to date, violent collisions of black holes and neutron stars that cause the very fabric of space and time to shudder. Stunning, new information about stellar evolution, the nature of strong gravity, the origin of gold and other heavy metals born in collisions of neutron stars, and the first direct measurement of the speed of gravity, to name just a few examples, has been the result. 

We also sketch the future of gravitational wave astronomy with ground-based detectors Cosmic Explorer (US) and Einstein Telescope (Europe), and in space with the joint ESA/NASA project LISA.Michael Landry is the Head of LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) in Richland, WA, and a physicist with the California Institute of Technology.  He received his PhD from the University of Manitoba in 2000, with experimental studies in strange quark matter at the Brookhaven AGS and TRIUMF accelerators. 

- Dr Mike Landry

• California Institute of Technology, LIGO Hanford Observatory

  • Senior Postdoctoral Scholar

  • Postdoctoral Scholar

• University of Manitoba, Canada

  • PhD, Nuclear and Particle Physics

• University of Calgary, Canada

  • BS, Physics with Astrophysics Minor

• Observatory Head, LIGO Hanford Observatory, Caltech

• Director of Operations, Cosmic Explorer

• Adjunct Professor, University of Manitoba

• Adjunct Professor, Washington State University