Talk «El sueño va sobre el tiempo: Agujeros negros y ondas gravitacionales» at the Astronomical Society Astrobanyoles

ICCUB’s postdoc researcher Tomás Andrade will deliver an outreach talk named «El sueño va sobre el tiempo: Agujeros negros y ondas gravitacionales» to the Astronomical Society Astrobanyoles next Saturday October 9 at 19h.  

In the talk, Andrade will discuss black hole collisions and the gravitational waves resulting from them. He will also invite us all to imagine what it would be like to have such a collision in a 6-dimensional universe and the differences we would observe with respect to what we detect in our 3+1 dimensional universe.  

In recent years, we were able to detect gravitational waves generated in black hole collisions thanks to the LIGO/VIRGO experiments. These are extremely energetic events (they emit 50 times more energy than that electromagnetically radiated by the entire known Universe) although if we could see it with our own eyes it would appear completely dark, since all this energy is emitted as gravitational waves. The collision itself lasts less than a second and the amplitudes of the emitted waves are of the order of magnitude of  m. To wrap our heads around how little that is, imagine the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, moving away a distance equivalent to a single hair! These are very particular waves since the thing they vibrate is the elastic fabric of spacetime itself as if it were the surface of a percussion instrument. 

If we caught your attention, don’t hesitate to attend the talk and dive into the mysteries of our Cosmos!