College of Science Distinguished Speaker: Dr. Vicky Kalogera

Cosmic Collisions Reveal Einstein's Gravitational-Wave UniverseJoin the College of Science in welcoming our final Distinguished Speaker in the 2018-2019 series!Dr. Vicky Kalogera is coming from the Department of Physics and Astronomy from Northwestern University. Dr. Kalogera is the leading astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). We are honored to host her for her lecuture titled: Cosmic Collisions Reveal Einstein’s Gravitational-Wave Universe. To find out more about Dr. Kalogera's research, visit her website. All are welcome!Dr. Kalogera's lecture will be immediately followed by a dessert reception. Abstract:For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from cataclysmic events in the distant universe. These recent observations confirm a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and open an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos. Gravitational waves carry unique information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the mergers of two black holes but also during the last hundred seconds of the collision of two neutron stars. The latter is the first ever cosmic event to be observed both in gravitational waves and in electromagnetic waves, shedding light to several long-standing puzzles, like the production of gold in nature and the physics origins of brief gamma-ray flashes. I will review the beginnings of this exciting field of cosmic exploration and the unprecedented technology and engineering that made it possible.  Speaker Bio: Vicky Kalogera is the co-founder and the current director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Kalogera is a leading astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), LIGO being the telescopes that first detected gravitational waves in 2015. An expert in the astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars and in LIGO data analysis, Kalogera has been a member of the LSC for more than 15 years, and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Kalogera’s astrophysics research involves methods from applied mathematics, statistics and computer science, with extensive use of high-performance computing. In parallel to her gravitational-wave source studies, Kalogera also studies the formation and evolution of stars and their remnants  detectable as gamma-ray, X-ray, and radio pulsar sources in the electromagneticspectrum in a wide range of stellar environments. For her research she has been recognized by numerous awards; most recently she was awarded the 2018 Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Institute for Physics and the American Astronomical Society.