Ruckman Public Lecture 2022: Celestial Clocks and Ripples in Spacetime

Annual Invited Guest Lecture

21 Oct 2022 | 7:30 - 8:30pm
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Presented by Michael Lam
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View of Lincoln Jorgensen Hall, home of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln

View of Lincoln Jorgensen Hall, home of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Credited to UN-L.

We are living in a sea of gravitational waves - ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's General Relativity and observed directly by ground-based detectors over the last few years. Another method on the cusp of making its first observations uses objects known as pulsars, precision celestial clocks in space. I will discuss how we build our galaxy-wide observatory with pulsars and the largest radio telescopes on Earth, the current challenges and advances in our scientific understanding of pulsar timing, and the science we hope to learn about in detecting gravitational waves as we reach this new frontier of astronomy.

Nebraska Union Auditorium, City Campus, and on Zoom: https://unl.zoom.us/j/94016206750