Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

Over the last three years the International Center for Theoretical Sciences (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India) has been organizing summer/winter schools on various topics in gravitational-wave (GW) physics and astronomy. Each school from this series targeted a particular sub-area (theory, experiment, data science, etc) of GW science. This year’s school has special significance because of the first direct detection of GWs by the LIGO observatories. The school involves three graduate-level courses in theoretical GW physics: Gravity: Newtonian, post-Newtonian, Relativistic by Clifford M. Will; Gravitational Astronomy by Bangalore S. Sathyaprakash; and Black Hole Perturbation Theory by Emanuele Berti. Videos of the lectures and lecture materials can be found here.

The L3 Study Team Interim Report has been released and posted on the PCOS website. The L3 Study Team was charged to provide an analysis of potential US hardware contributions to the ESA-led L3 Gravitational Wave mission and an assessment of their consequences on cost, risk, and science return. Some highlights from the report:

• The science case for a space-based GW observatory, endorsed by both the 2010 Decadal Survey and ESA’s 2013 Cosmic Visions process, remains compelling. Realizing a mission that fully delivers this science in a timely fashion and with low risk should be the primary objective of US participation in L3.

A conclusion of our analysis is that multiple viable options of US participation in L3 exist, each with a different mix of cost, risk, and impact. While it is likely that the US will only contribute a subset of these items to the final partnership, continuing some level of development across the entire portfolio is an effective strategy to reduce overall mission risk as well as provide additional insight to the US science and technology communities.

Precision tests of general relativity are being developed enthusiastically on many fronts, but there is not enough communication between researchers working across different distance scales — the observables, parametrization frameworks, and even alternative theories are different and hard to compare. The Burke Institute at Caltech is sponsoring a workshop on these topics (Unifying Tests of General Relativity) that will take place on July 19-21, 2016. The workshop will focus on developing a sort of “lingua franca” for those working on cosmological and strong-field tests of gravity, the eventual aim being the ability to usefully interpret observational results across the two fields. The workshop is organized by Emanuele Berti, Phil Bull, Sean Carroll, Yanbei Chen, Olivier Doré, Jérôme Gleyzes and Leo C. Stein.

Update [7/22/2016]: here is a group photo from the workshop!

The two LIGO gravitational wave detectors in Hanford Washington and Livingston Louisiana have caught a second robust signal from two black holes in their final orbits and then their coalescence into a single black hole. Read about the discovery and the contribution of the UM LIGO team to it on UM news.

The International Center for Theoretical Sciences (Bangalore, India) is organizing a Summer School on Gravitational-Wave Astronomy. The application deadline is June 30. The two-week school (7/25/2016-8/5/2016) will consist of three graduate-level courses in theoretical gravitational-wave physics delivered by Clifford M. Will, Bangalore S. Sathyaprakash and Emanuele Berti.