Whispers from the Universe: Astronomy with Gravitational Waves

Dr. Brady will talk about the generation of gravitational waves by colliding black holes and neutron stars, and how they are measured here on Earth using the LIGO detectors. He will tell the story of the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2017, through to the exciting observations that are becoming almost routine.

Patrick Brady received his B.Sc. from University College Dublin in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alberta in 1994 where he studied with Werner Israel. He has held research positions at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Caltech, University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1999, Brady has been at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he holds the rank of Professor and is Director of the Leonard E Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology, and Astrophysics. Brady has been a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a Sloan Research Fellow, and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. Brady is a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and currently serves as Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. His research focuses on the analysis and interpretation of data from the worldwide network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The November meeting will be a virtual event, hosted with Zoom. Members will receive an email with a link and instructions to join a day or two before the event.