The beginnings of gravitational wave astronomy: current state and future

The first detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 with the measurement of the coalescence of two ~30 solar mass black holes at a distance of about 1 billion light years from Earth. The talk will begin with some history and basic ideas of gravitational waves. Then a review of more recent measurements of black hole events as well as the first detection of the coalescence of two neutron stars and the beginning of multi-messenger astrophysics will be provided. The talk will end with a discussion of some prospects for the field.

Bio

Rainer Weiss was born Sept 29,1932, in Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD in 1962 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a member of the MIT Physics faculty from 1964-2001 and he received the title of professor emeritus in 2001. His primary areas of research are atomic clocks, cosmic background radiation measurements and gravitational wave detection.  In 2017 Rainer Weiss was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Barry Barish and Kip Thorn "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".^[1]