Bernard F. Schutz, PhD, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, also known as the Albert Einstein Institute, in Potsdam, Germany, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture.
Schutz
Schutz will give a talk titled “Gravitational Waves: Listening to the True Music of the Spheres” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, in Room 300, Lab Sciences Building. The talk is free and open to the public.
Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime that radiate from massive objects such as white dwarfs, neutrons stars or black holes.
In some interesting cases, astronomical objects radiate at frequencies in the same range as those of sounds waves and can be translated into sound waves. “Gravitational waves are spacetime’s counterpart to sound waves,” Schutz says, “and our detectors are our microphones.
“In this multimedia presentation, you will be able to listen to the ‘sounds’ made by massive black holes, colliding neutron stars, exploding supernovas and the Big Bang itself,” he says.
So far the sounds are only theoretical constructs. Gravitational waves have been detected, but only indirectly. Schutz, who is a member of three of the current large-scale gravitational wave projects, expects they will be detected directly within the next 10 years.
Those projects include GEO600, a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, Germany; LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), whose detectors are located near Livingston, La., and on the Hanford Site in the state of Washington; and LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a space-based gravitational wave detector that is scheduled to be launched in 2020.
Born in the United States, Schutz earned a bachelor of science degree from Clarkson University and a doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology. He taught physics and astronomy for 20 years at Cardiff University in Wales, where he still holds a part-time chair, before moving to Germany.
The McDonnell Center, which was established in 1975 through a gift from the aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, is a consortium of WUSTL faculty, research staff and students coming primarily from the Arts & Sciences departments of earth and planetary sciences and of physics who are working on the cutting edge of space research.
For more information, contact Trecia Marie Stumbaugh at (314) 935-5332 or trecia@physics.wustl.edu.