On Friday, May 17, 2024, CIERA welcomed 170 in-person and 25 remote participants to its 3rd annual Astronomy Night Out, an evening dedicated to sharing astronomy with the community through a variety of formats.
The keynote public lecture was presented by CIERA-Adler Postdoctoral Fellow Caitlin Witt and entitled, “Tuning into the Cosmic Symphony: Pulsar Timing, the Gravitational Wave Background, and Beyond.” In her talk, Dr. Witt explored last summer’s major astronomy announcement: evidence of the gravitational wave background. Dr. Witt explained how monitoring the steady, lighthouse-like flashes emitted by pulsars (a type of neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star), allowed researchers to tease out the “bass notes” in the cosmic symphony of gravitational waves. This work is conducted by pulsar timing arrays like the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). As a member of NANOGrav, Dr. Witt leads efforts to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) and develops methods that inform multi-messenger searches for these elusive pairs.
Learn more about CIERA’s Astronomy Night Out.
- Education,
- Event,
- Outreach