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October 10, 2024

ICDS co-hire contributes to gravitational wave research

ICDS co-hire contributes to gravitational wave research

A heavy use of computational tools can help to detect what has yet to be discovered, according to Chad Hanna, professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.

Hanna, who started at the University in 2014 and is a Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) co-hire, works in a large research group as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Hanna’s research team, which includes Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) team member Ron Tapia, is working to discover astrophysical events — such as gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 — caused by the merger of two black holes or other celestial objects.

“The LIGO observatory measures tiny distortions in space that are caused by the merging black holes,” Hanna said. “We are learning about the universe through measuring these tiny distortions in space. It’s a big effort that requires a lot of people for observations to run sustainably day and night.”

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.