Friday 17th April 2015 – Vikram Ravi – “A Galaxy-sized telescope: using pulsars as gravitational-wave detectors to study supermassive black holes”

8pm Friday 17th April we have Vikram Ravi from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at the Swinburne University of Technology talking about “A Galaxy-sized telescope: using pulsars as gravitational-wave detectors to study supermassive black holes“.

The study of the smallest, densest astrophysical objects like black holes and neutron stars will be revolutionised by gravitational-wave astronomy. Large international efforts, such as LIGO, are underway to detect gravitational waves: travelling warps in the structure of space predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. While most such efforts are focused on building sophisticated gravitational-wave telescopes, the experiment that I shall describe is somewhat different. We use a network of radio pulsars scattered throughout our Galaxy, observed with the Parkes telescope, as our gravitational-wave detector. The size of our detector allows us to be sensitive to gravitational waves with light-year wavelengths, such as from binary supermassive black holes in the cores of distant merging galaxies. I will present constraints that we have placed on how supermassive black holes formed and evolved.

Following the talk and supper, there will be viewing through the MBO telescopes (weather permitting). If you have a telescope and would like to know how to use it, or alternatively, would like to show it off to us, please bring it along.

Members’ Night is on every Friday night commencing at 8PM (doors open 7:30PM). Members and their guests are always welcome.

Please consider the neighbours and drive in and out quietly using low beam only, or better still, parking lights.

Please note: MBO will always be closed on days of Severe, Extreme and Code Red fire ratings, please see the CFA website for that information.