Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, Mar 06, 2026
Ringing Black Hole Bells and Other Exciting Recent Results in Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Prof. Will Farr
In the last decade, just over 100 years after Einstein first proposed the theory of general relativity that predicts waves in space and time, the field of gravitational wave astronomy has delivered many firsts: the first detection of gravitational waves — from a pair of Manhattan-sized black holes merging — in 2015; the first detection of gravitational waves from a merging pair of neutron stars — an event which also produced electromagnetic emission that was ultimately observed in various ways by roughly 30 percent of the global astronomical community, as well as an Earth-mass worth of heavy elements such as gold and platinum — in 2017; the first detection of multiple gravitational wave ‘spectral lines’ from a black hole ‘ringing’ like a bell; and, just last year, the clearest evidence yet that the mathematical idealization of the Kerr solution in general relativity actually describes real, astrophysical black holes.. In this lecture, I will discuss some of these exciting results in detail and explain the bright future of this fast-moving new field.
Prof. Will M. Farr earned his B.S. in Physics from Caltech in 2003 and his PhD from MIT in 2010. After a CIERA fellowship at Northwestern University, he joined the faculty at the University of Birmingham in 2013. In 2018 he moved to Stony Brook University and the Center for Computational Astrophysics (part of the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute). He is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the leader of the CCA's Gravitational Wave Astronomy Group. He is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, an international collaboration of scientists studying gravitational waves detected by the LIGO instruments.
