Colloquium – Stephen Taylor

Stephen Taylor, Vanderbilt University

The Dawn of Galaxy-Scale Gravitational Wave Astronomy

For more than 15 years, NANOGrav and other pulsar-timing array collaborations have been carefully monitoring networks of pulsars across the Milky Way. The mission was to find a tell-tale signature amid the data from all those pulsars that would signal the presence of an all-sky background of low-frequency gravitational waves, washing through the Galaxy. At the end of June, NANOGrav finally announced its evidence for this gravitational-wave background. I will describe this journey as well as the human story behind the science, and discuss possible interpretations of this signal, both in terms of a population of supermassive black-hole binary systems and exotic cosmological processes in the early Universe.

Sept 14, 2023 @ 4:00pm Central in Stevenson 4327; reception beforehand at 3:30pm in Stevenson 6333

Host: A. Lupsasca

To join via Zoom, please contact Reina Beach (reina.beach@vanderbilt.edu) to request the Zoom link.