College of Medicine

The general public and FSU community is invited to this free lecture titled, "Einstein, Gravitational Waves and Black Holes" by Gabriela Gonzalez from Louisiana State University.

More than a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted that there were ripples in the fabric of space-time traveling at the speed of light: gravitational waves. On September 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana in the US registered for the first time ever a loud gravitational wave signal traveling through Earth, created more than a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes. A few months later, in December 2015, another signal, also from black holes, was detected. These observations marked the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy. We will describe the history and details of the observations, and the gravity-bright future of the field.