From SAS Secretary Aprill Harper
SAS Presents Prof Martin Hendry: Listening to Einstein’s Universe – the Exciting Dawn of Gravitational-Wave Astronomy
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time produced by the most violent events in the cosmos: exploding stars, colliding black holes, even the Big Bang itself. They were by predicted in 1915 by Albert Einstein and detected 100 years later by the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built – a discovery awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics. And yet in just seven years the detection of gravitational waves has gone from an epoch-making breakthrough to an almost routine occurrence, with nearly 100 gravitational-wave events observed to date, and has opened an entirely new way for astronomers to study the universe. In this talk join Professor Martin Hendry as he explores the exciting dawn – and bright future – of gravitational-wave astronomy, and the remarkable new picture of Einstein’s universe which it is revealing to us.
Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow. In August 2022 he was appointed Clerk of Senate and Vice-Principal of the University. Martin is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), the global team of more than
1500 scientists which made the first ever detection of gravitational waves in 2015. That same year, Martin was awarded an MBE for his services to the public understanding of science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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