Hunt for Gravitational Waves: A story spanning the frequencies of space-time

Gravitational Waves are the ripples in the fabric of space-time created by some of the most violent dances in the universe between heavy, dense and extreme objects called compact binaries. Compact objects include star remnants such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. When two of such compact objects get trapped into each other they spiral with increasing speed towards their shared center and eventually collide, forming strong ripples in space-time that we detect from earth.

There have been many efforts in GW detection since the 1900s, the most recent and famous of which is LIGO. But there are also upcoming missions such as the LISA mission spearheaded by the ESA and the NANOGrav collaboration’s work on pulsar timing arrays. In this talk, we will see an overview of the targets, data analysis pipelines and upcoming research in each of these three quests.

Speaker: Shan Parmar, Cornell University