Studying gravitational waves with radio telescopes - today and tomorrow
by
Prof.Michael Kramer(MPI Radioastronomy, Bonn)
→
Europe/Berlin
MPI Meeting rooms
MPI Meeting rooms
Description
Radio pulsars provided the first evidence for the existence of gravitational waves (GWs), recognised with the Nobel Prize award to Hulse and Taylor in 1993. Today, a direct detection using dedicated ground-based detectors has been achieved, opening up a new window to the Universe. While detectors like LIGO search the GW spectrum at the kHz-regime, other methods are needed to explore in particular lower frequencies. One method that is applicable in the nHz-regime are, again, radio pulsars. Rather than using them as sources of GWs, observations with radio telescopes make them to GW detectors of Galactic size. Instead of using the light-travel time of Laser light to measure variations in distances, we can use the light-travel time of pulses to detect the impact of GWs on the local spacetime. Sources include supermassive binary black holes that are expected to be created during the hierarchical formation of galaxies. This talk will give an update on these experiments and their prospects.
Note that the talk starts half an hour later than usual!
