Recent News
Cork Astronomy: LISA Consortium Membership
*Image of a galaxy merger, the precursor to massive black hole binaries/mergers.
Cork Astrophysics is now an official member group of the LISA Consortium.
LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is an ESA-led mission to put a gravitational wave detector into space in the 2030s. This device has the potential to detect gravitational waves (ripples in space-time) emitted by a wide range of sources, from wide stellar binaries to merging massive black holes (>10,000 solar masses). Some of these signals, particularly from massive black holes, will come to us from when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old. The Cork Astrophysics group focuses on characterizing and understanding these sources so that, when LISA is launched and data is received, it can be used to better understand the underlying physics of these objects (white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes across the mass spectrum). To this end, our group models the formation and evolution of these binary systems, and we attempt to observe them through other means (i.e. using light). The Cork Astrophysics Group within LISA is led by Dr. Michael Tremmel, School of Physics, UCC, and is a part of the astrophysics working group of the consortium.