Seattle Harper Lecture: Hearing and Seeing the Collision of Neutron Stars

On August 17, 2017, two global scientific collaborations, LIGO and Virgo, detected the gravitational waves from two neutron stars crashing into each other at close to the speed of light. Two seconds later, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a burst of gamma rays, and 12 hours later the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) telescope in Chile discovered a new “star,” which subsequently disappeared over the course of a couple of weeks. Join Daniel E. Holz to learn about UChicago’s role in this combination of discoveries, as well as the implications for Einstein’s theory of gravity and a completely new way to measure the rate at which the universe is expanding. We are at the dawn of a truly new kind of astronomy.

To register or find out more information, please click here.

Featured Faculty

Daniel E. Holz is an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and he holds appointments at the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Holz studies the interface of general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology, focusing on topics ranging from nearby black holes to distant supernovas, and from dark matter to the most massive superclusters of galaxies. He is currently exploring what we will learn about the universe from gravitational wave detectors; in particular, he is studying binary compact objects composed of black holes or neutron stars as powerful electromagnetic and gravitational wave sources. Holz is a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which has detected gravitational waves from black holes and ushered in the era of gravitational wave astronomy. Check out the New York Times’s coverage of the neutron star collision story.

To learn more about the entire Harper Lecture Series, please visit the UChicago Alumni Association's page.

Questions? Contact alumniassociation@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2150.