Sergei Klimenko
Abstract:
On September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA both measured ripples in the fabric of spacetime – gravitational waves – arriving at the Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. A century after the fundamental predictions of Einstein and Schwarzschild, the gravitational waves are captured. This discovery comes at the culmination of decades of instrument research and development, through a world-wide effort of thousands of researchers. I will talk about the LIGO detectors, detection details, nature of the source and the results of this observation.