Astrophysicist studies black hole collisions and neutron star mergers
News source: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
When IMRE BARTOS first became interested in researching gravitational waves in 2004, his college professors advised against it. Since Albert Einstein theorized about their existence in 1915, no one had actually observed gravitational waves, ripples in space time caused by major cosmic events such as black hole collisions. The field was considered a dead end.
That continued to be true for another decade — until September 14, 2015, when, using an algorithm designed at UF, an international team of researchers detected gravitational waves emanating from the collision of two black holes over a billion light years from Earth. Arriving a century after Einstein’s prediction, the discovery shocked Bartos, then at Columbia University. Read more