Astro Night

Thu, October 03, 2019

Gravitational Waves: Messengers from the Dark Universe

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time that travel at the speed of light. First predicted by Einstein, it took almost 100 years to detect them using the most sensitive machine ever built. Only the Universe’s most violent phenomena are loud enough to be detected, including the collision of black holes, from which not even light can escape. I will present the basic properties of gravitational waves, the world-wide effort to detect them and how gravitational wave astronomy is opening a new window into the unknown universe and providing us with new means to test Einstein’s ideas about the nature of gravity.

Miguel is a theoretical cosmologist interested in all-things-gravity, including the relation between the universe’s history and gravity, dark energy, alternatives to Einstein’s theory, dark matter and black holes. He has collaborated with the Berkeley Science Review and other popular science outlets. He joined the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics 3 years ago after working in Sweden, Germany and Spain. In 2020 he will move back to Germany to start a junior group leader position at the Max Planck for Gravitational Physics.