Seminar - Quasars, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

Public Lecture

Speaker: Emeritus Professor Roy Kerr
Time: Tuesday 6th December 2016 at 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Location: Lecture Theatre, Rutherford House, 23 Lambton Quay 1
URL: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/news/2016/12/a-kiwi-einstein-visits-victoria
Groups: "Mathematics" "Statistics and Operations Research"

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Abstract

In 1963 it was realised that certain radio "stars" were enormously powerful objects in far distant galaxies, but the mechanism that drove them was a mystery. Serendipitously, I discovered the unique solution for rotating black holes at this time and it was fairly quickly realised that the accretion disc around one of these could supply the necessary energy. Since then we have observed such supermassive black holes at the centre of most large galaxies. The most energetic objects in the universe are GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursters). These are generally considered to be hypernova from a very massive rotating star collapsing to a Black hole. However another theory is that they are caused by mergers of massive neutron stars or black holes. In the last year Ligo has observed mergers of three pairs of rotating black holes, each 10-40 solar masses. The gravitational waves from these have been compared to templates calculated by a mixture of numerical and analytic solutions of Einstein's equations for such events.

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