The Dawn of Galaxy-scale Gravitational Wave Astronomy

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• Stephen Taylor, Vanderbilt University
• Thursday 07 March 2024, 16:00-17:00
• Hoyle Lecture Theatre, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm).

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For more than 15 years, NANO Grav and other pulsar-timing array collaborations have been carefully monitoring networks of pulsars across the Milky Way. The goal was to find a tell-tale correlation signature amid the data from all those pulsars that would signal the presence of an all-sky background of nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves, washing through the Galaxy. At the end of June 2023, the global pulsar-timing array community finally announced its evidence for this gravitational-wave background, along with a series of studies that interpreted this signal as either originating from a population of supermassive black-hole binary systems, or as relics from cosmological processes in the very early Universe. I will describe the journey up to this point (including the integral role that the IoA played), what led to the ultimate breakthrough, how this affects our knowledge of supermassive black holes and the early Universe, and what lies next for gravitational-wave astronomy at light-year wavelengths.

This talk is part of the The Eddington Lectures series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology lists
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Hoyle Lecture Theatre, IoA (tea at 3:30 pm)
• Institute of Astronomy Colloquia
• Institute of Astronomy Talk Lists
• Kavli Institute for Cosmology Talk Lists
• Priscilla
• The Eddington Lectures

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