Detecting Gravitational Waves from the Heaviest Black Holes in the Universe

SYNOPSIS: In January 2021, the NANOGrav Collaboration announced the discovery of excess low-frequency noise in many of the pulsars that it monitors (https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/astronomers-may-be-hearing-the-whisper-of-billions-of-black-holes-merging-across-the). This noise appears to have consistent properties in pulsars that are separated across the entire expanse of our Milky Way Galaxy. While definitive evidence will follow in the next year or so, this may be the first hints of a bassline “hum” of gravitational waves from every supermassive black-hole binary system resounding together in a cosmic symphony. These gravitational waves wash over our galaxy, distorting the space-time between the pulsars and Earth, and affecting the timing regularity of radio pulses measured from these pulsars. In this talk, Dr. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, will discuss the origins of gravitational waves, various ongoing missions to detect them, and the new frontier this promises for probing the darkest mysteries of the Universe.

BIO: Stephen R. Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. Originally from Northern Ireland, Stephen studied Physics at Oxford from 2006-2010, before earning his PhD from Cambridge in 2014. He was awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014 to research gravitational-wave science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech in Pasadena, California. He joined Vanderbilt as a faculty member in 2019.

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