Astronomer to Discuss Einstein's Wrinkles in Spacetime and Black Holes in Public Lecture at Carleton

Astrophysicist Andrea Lommen will present a lecture entitled "Measuring Einstein's Last Great Legacy: Wrinkles in Space-Time," on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 7:30 p.m. in Olin Hall, room 141, at Carleton College. Lommen’s presentation, accessible to those with little or no scientific background, is free and open to the public.

Lommen explains, “We think that space is wrinkled, much like a shirt in need of ironing, except that the wrinkles in space travel at the speed of light. The wrinkling is the result of something called ‘gravitational waves,’ whose existence was predicted by Einstein and suggested by various experiments, but never before directly observed.”

The waves are created by exotic  astronomical objects and events such as black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and supernova implosions. In order to detect these waves, Lommen and her team use giant radio telescopes to watch a set of pulsars (rapidly spinning stars that emit radio pulses). Called the North American Nanohertz Observatory of Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), this project uses the pulsars as a galaxy-sized gravitational wave "telescope," which will enable the astronomers to study the nature of the exotic objects that created the waves.

Over the next decade, NANOGrav should detect thousands of pairs of merging black holes. Each of these black holes, typically at the center of a galaxy, have masses billions of times greater than the Sun's. The mergers create such strong gravitational waves that they should be detectable by NANOGrav at distances up to billions of light years.

Professor Lommen is a 1991 Carleton College graduate, later earning a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is chair of the North American Nano-Hertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), and two years ago was awarded one of NSF's prestigious  five-year Career Awards for the possibility of detecting gravitational waves using pulsars. She recently spoke on this topic at the wildly successful World Science Festival "mashup" in New York City. She currently work as an associate professor and director of the astronomy program at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

An avid dancer and choreographer, Lommen created a course called the "Physics of Movement" in which she teaches introductory physics using the human body and its motions as her primary examples.  

For more information on Lommen’s appearance, contact Carleton College astronomy professor Joel Weisberg at (507) 222-4367 or jweisber@carleton.edu.