212 | Chiara Mingarelli on Searching for Black Holes with Pulsars

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2022

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The detection of gravitational waves from inspiraling black holes by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations was rightly celebrated as a landmark achievement in physics and astronomy. But ultra-precise ground-based observatories aren’t the only way to detect gravitational waves; we can also search for their imprints on the timing of signals from pulsars scattered throughout our galaxy. Chiara Mingarelli is a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration, which uses pulsar timing to study the universe using gravitational waves.

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Chiara Mingarelli received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Birmingham. She is currently an assistant professor of physics at the University of Connecticut and a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics. Her Ph.D. thesis was selected by Springer Nature as an Outstanding PhD thesis, and she was selected as a “Voice of the Future” by the Royal Astronomical Society. She regularly contributes to science communication, including Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls and the Science Channel’s “How the Universe Works."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.5	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.3	So we've just been through an eventful launch week for the book version of the biggest
0:08.4	ideas in the universe, volume one on space time and motion.
0:12.3	That was fun.
0:13.3	Gave a bunch of talks.
0:14.5	And we had the podcast last week, the solo podcast, which highlighted one of the ideas
0:20.8	from the biggest ideas, which was Einstein's equation for general relativity.
0:24.7	The equation relating space time and how it curves to matter in energy, things like that.
0:30.7	And the payoff of that equation is that you discover the existence of black holes.
0:35.9	Basically neither Einstein nor even Schwarzschild, who went off and solved Einstein's equation
0:41.5	immediately after Einstein came up with it.
0:43.9	Neither one of them knew that they were predicting black holes.
0:46.9	They went to their graves, as it were, not knowing that black holes were predicted by
0:50.9	general relativity.
0:52.2	Of course, things changed.
0:54.3	Einstein died in the 1950s and the late 50s and 60s scientists really began to understand
1:00.3	what black holes are.
1:02.3	These days, as it turns out, we observe them.
1:05.8	Not directly, of course, they're black.
1:07.2	We can't actually see them give off radiation.
1:10.0	But we absolutely know they're there because we can see what effects they have on the universe
	...

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