Space itself is wobbly. We exist on a choppy sea, its surface roiled by disturbances caused by the movements of black holes hundreds of millions of light-years away. The recent detection of these ‘gravitational waves’ by a completely novel type of observatory is a story of scientific persistence and precision engineering, resulting in a completely new way of looking at the cosmos. The lecture highlighted results from the last year of observations, discussed the nature of black holes – the most mysterious of astronomical objects – and explained how the gold in your jewellery was made.

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/sites/default/files/transcript/2024-12-03_0756_Lintott-T.pdf

Reading List
• Pedro Ferreira’s ‘The Perfect Theory: Acentury of geniuses and the battle over General Relativity’ (Abacus, 2015) is an excellent introduction to the field.
• ‘A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage’ (Apollo, 2024) by Marcus Chown concentrates on the enigmatic objects themselves.
The best books on LIGO are:
• ‘Ripples on a cosmic sea’ (Perseus, 1997) for the early history
• ‘Gravity’s Kiss’ by Harry Collins (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
There is a curated library of papers produced by the LIGO collaboration here: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-publications
For GW170817, Professor Lintott especially enjoyed the paper which describes the follow-up with the world’s telescopes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05833
There is a nice summary of the Hulse-Taylor pulsar here: https://astrobites.org/2018/02/02/looking-back-at-the-hulse-taylor-binary-pulsar/
A good popular article of the early Weber attempts to find gravitational waves is here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2015/10/12/joseph-weber-and-the-failed-search-for-gravitational-waves/
Part of:
Seeing the Universe
This event was on Wed, 04 Dec 2024
Astronomy
Science
Discovery
Technology

Professor Chris Lintott

Gresham Professor of Astronomy (2023-)

Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.
Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.
Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lintott
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/lintott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/4jgzzH6CBH7b5K0qblb73nZ/professor-chris-lintott