On Thursday, 29 April 2021 at 4.30 p.m., Professor Monica Colpi (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca) will give a presentation on “The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna to Explore the Invisible Universe” (more on LISA below). To attend, follow the instructions available in the Indico event.
The colloquium will be followed by a Library Talk event presenting two science popularisation books on the beauty of astrophysics and gravitational waves: Monica Colpi’s Notte Siriaca (Science Express) and Paola Catapano’s Il Lungo Viaggio delle Onde Gravitazionali (Textus). The talks will be moderated by Antonella Del Rosso, after a short introduction by Tullio Basaglia. The books being published in Italian, the Library Talk event will be in Italian only.
All colloquium attendees are invited to stay for this presentation, which will be accessible via the same Zoom link.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)
LISA, a gigameter-scale space-based gravitational wave observatory, will explore the gravitational wave universe in the band from below 0.1 mHz to above 0.1 Hz. LISA will grant us access to a huge cosmological volume with unprecedented reach deep into space, detecting signals up to redshifts 20-30 and even beyond, if sources exist. LISA will detect massive black hole coalescences to unveil the as-yet-unknown origins of the first quasars and to shed light into the teeming population of middleweight black holes forming in galactic dark matter halos. LISA will discover the link between the most energetic phenomena in the universe – accreting and merging black holes – and the grand design of galaxy assembly. In synergy with third-generation ground-based interferometers, we will discover how gravitational collapse to a black hole is triggered, on all astrophysically relevant mass scales from a few tens to a few billions of solar masses. I will address how the X-ray mission Athena, which is joining LISA in concurrent multi-messenger observations of massive black hole coalescences, will greatly enhance our knowledge on the propagation properties of gravitational waves and on the rate of expansion of our universe.
Monica Colpi