Monthly Meeting August – Celestial Songs: A Cosmic Spacetime Symphony

The Universe sings an intricate melody composed of gravitational waves, the cosmic echoes of cataclys-
mic events. Yet it’s only in recent years that we have begun to listen to this space-time symphony. In this
talk, we’ll embark on a journey through the revolutionary advancements in gravitational wave astronomy.
First, we’ll trace our understanding of the subject from the conceptualisation of cosmic ripples in 1916
through to the Nobel Prize-winning gravitational wave discovery of the merger of two black holes. We’ll
then discuss Aotearoa’s contributions to this work. Join us as we uncover the cosmic symphony, tracing
our evolution from theory to discovery in our quest to understand the Universe’s celestial songs.

Dr Avi Vajpeyi is a research fellow working at the University of Auckland and a member of the scientific
collaborations Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Laser Interferometer
Space Antenna (LISA). His work involves “listening” to gravitational waves emitted from black holes collid-
ing with each other.