“Gravitational waves, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), and extreme mass ratio inspirals” was the title of our March public lecture. We were delighted to welcome Dr Niels Warburton, Assistant Professor at University College Dublin and a member of the LISA Consortium. Main image: Artist’s conception of LISA spacecraft (NASA). Small images: left, Neils opens his lecture, and right centre, contines to discuss gravitational waves with John Walsh and Lynda O’Mahony after the meeting closed.
An audience of over 70 got an introduction to gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space and time, detected by methods wholly different from traditional, electromagnetic astronomy. Neils then discussed the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, a proposed space-based detector that was recently adopted by the European Space Agency and NASA for launch in 2035. He finished with an overview of a particularly interesting source for LISA: Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals, where a compact object orbits a supermassive black hole.
Dr Warburton is Royal Society-SFI University Research Fellow at University College Dublin, and member of the LISA Consortium.