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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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One hundred years after Einstein’s formulation of General Relativity, Advanced LIGO has detected for the first time gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced by cataclysmic astrophysical event.
1.3 billion years ago, two black holes inspiraled and merged, releasing a power that is 50 times that of the visible universe, in the form of gravitational waves. Since then, the waves have traveled through the Universe and reached Earth on the morning of September 14, 2015. In this talk I will describe this groundbreaking discovery, what we have learned from it, and discuss why this is opening a new field of gravitational wave astronomy.
