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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 6, 2006 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Joan Centrella

"Spacetime Engineering: Binary Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and LISA"

ABSTRACT -- The final merger of two black holes releases a tremendous amount of energy and is one of the brightest sources in the gravitational wave sky. Observing these sources with gravitational wave detectors requires that we know the radiation waveforms they emit. Since these mergers take place in regions of extreme gravity, we need to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity on a computer in order to calculate these waveforms.

For more than 30 years, scientists have tried to compute these waveforms using the methods of numerical relativity. The resulting computer codes have been plagued by pernicious instabilities, causing them to crash well before the black holes in the binary can complete an orbit and merge. This situation has changed dramatically in the past year, with a series of amazing breakthroughs. This talk will take you on this quest for the holy grail of numerical relativity, showing how a spacetime is constructed on a computer to build a simulation laboratory for binary black hole mergers. We will focus on the recent advances that are revealing these waveforms, and the dramatic new potential for discoveries that arises when these sources are observed by LISA.

SPEAKER -- Joan Centrella received her PhD from Cambridge University, where she was a student at the Institute of Astronomy. Following postdoctoral appointments at the University of Texas and the University of Illinois, she joined the faculty of Drexel University in the Physics Department. In 2001, she moved to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to join their newly-formed gravitational wave astrophysics group, where she leads their source modeling and numerical relativity effort in support of LISA. In 2004 she became head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory, which encompasses the gravitational wave and theoretical astrophysics groups at Goddard. Her research interests include black hole mergers, gravitational waves, numerical relativity, structure formation, and cosmology.




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