Owing to meriSTEM’s beginnings, our office is located within the Department of Quantum Science at ANU in Canberra. We know we’re lucky to have tearoom chats every day with professors and students of some fascinating science projects, and we wanted to share. So, at a teachers’ professional development workshop last year, we invited Dr Vaishali Adya to be our guest speaker. Vaishali is a postdoctoral researcher in interferometry at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).
Vaishali introduced her science to the workshop’s diverse audience and described how the endeavours of more than 1000 other researchers across the world are contributing to gravitational wave research too, as part of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaboration. LIGO (standing for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is the collective name for the two US-based gravitational wave detectors. Together with partner detectors in Italy, Germany and Japan, this state-of-the-art technology is making new and improved observations in astronomy possible.
Back at the workshop in Canberra, Vaishali also talked about how mass tells space-time how to curve, how space-time tells mass how to move, and gave us her rendition of what it sounds like when black holes collide!
https://www.ligo.org/science.php
Thanks to volunteer editor Lucy Campbell