Today's colloquium: Detecting Gravitational Waves with Pulsars: Taming the Interstellar Medium

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© Dan Stinebring, Stelios Kazantzidis

Today's colloquium by Dan Stinebring will discuss how ASTRON researchers and colleagues around the world are using pulsars to try and detect gravitational waves from orbiting supermassive black holes. The picture of the day (produced by astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis, Ohio State University) shows a computer simulation of two Milky Way sized galaxies colliding. The supermassive black holes at their center end up orbiting each other and producing gravitational radiation that should be detectable through high-precision timing of millisecond pulsars, as Stinebring will explain.