The goal of STEMinars is to inform the TTU community about outreach, research and educational activities and opportunities. Please click on the link to register to attend this event:
http://linser.ttu.edu/webapps/EventRegistration/. This months' STEMinar features Dr. Benjamin Owen, who is Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas Tech University. Below is his abstract.
Last year LIGO and Virgo published the first detection of gravitational waves, from a binary black hole merger, a century after their prediction by Albert Einstein. That detection got this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. This year we published the detection of the first gravitational waves from a binary neutron star merger, accompanied by the full spectrum of electromagnetic waves from gamma rays to visible light to radio waves. It made last year’s detection look boring. I’ll describe what we learned from both.