Thursday, September 21, 2017, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
Nicolas Leroy, LAL Orsay
Abstract:
During the two first scientific runs of the new generation of
gravitational wave detectors, the two LIGO instruments registered three
events consistent with gravitational wave emission by the merger of two
black holes. The reconstructed waveforms of the signals show that the
systems were located at a distance of few hundreds Mpc, and were
constituent masses of tens of M_sun and few M_sun were radiated in
gravitational wave emission.
These detections, 100 years after its theoretical prediction and after
50 years of experimental quest, opens a new way to observe powerful
astrophysical sources. In this talk I will describe shortly the
detectors and the main information we obtain from these observations.