The next "Jeudi des Sciences" organised by the University of Luxembourg will take place on 12 May 2016 and will focus on the discovery of gravitational waves. Dr Hartmut Grote from the Albert Einstein Institute Hannover will talk about the gravitational waves that were already predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 and now, after 50 years of effort, successfully detected by scientists and engineers.

In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves but considered them to be too weak to be ever detected. Nonetheless, after 50 years of effort, scientists and engineers have now succeeded in this challenge. The first detection of gravitational waves allows us to listen to the ripples of space-time and witness the violent collision of black holes more than a billion years ago! A new instrument for astronomy is born, bringing us account from otherwise invisible affairs of the cosmos.

Hartmut Grote received his PhD in physics from the University of Hannover and spent the post-doc time in the USA and Japan. Since 2009 he has been the scientific leader of the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector. He is a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover and is currently spending one year at the LIGO Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.

The lecture will take place on Thursday, 12 May 2016 at 17:30 in room B02 on Kirchberg Campus, 6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1359 Luxembourg.

© dpa