Observations of a Gravitational Wave Signature in 15-Years of Pulsar Timing Data with NANOGrav

Date

Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023

Speaker

Dr. Elizabeth C. Ferrara, research faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Time

1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Location

American Center for Physics, One Ellipse Drive, College Park, MD (and available on Zoom)

Abstract

On June 28, 2023, teams of researchers around the world published reports on the first evidence of the presence of very long wavelength gravitational waves, thought to arise from orbiting pairs of the most massive black holes at the centers of galaxies throughout the Universe. This evidence is the result of the analysis of 15-plus years of monitoring the signals from numerous pulsars around our galaxy. One of those reports is from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational
Waves, or NANOGrav. Our speaker is a researcher on this project and one of the report’s authors.

Biography

Dr. Elizabeth C. Ferrara is a University of Maryland research faculty member, and a researcher on the NANOGrav project. She is also an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center where she is the Lead Scientist for the Guest Observer Facility for NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) on the International Space Station. Dr. Ferrara received her PhD in Astronomy from Georgia State University in 2000. In her spare time she is a ballroom dancer, scuba diver, and an avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

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