A free public lecture titled "Unraveling the Cosmic Melody of Black Holes" will be presented by Jillian Bellovary from CUNY Queensborough Community College at the Aspen Center for Physics on Wednesday, February 5. This event is part of the Nick and Maggie DeWolf Foundation winter lecture series.

The evening will begin at 5:00 PM with tea and cookies, followed by the lecture at 5:30 PM sharp. Free parking is available at the Center and in the surrounding neighborhood. Attendees are also encouraged to use the Downtowner or RFTA Crosstown Shuttle for easy access.

While the lecture is free, RSVPs are highly recommended.

Supermassive Black Holes are awesome! But do you know what's even more awesome? Merging supermassive black holes! Black holes smashing together is one of the most powerful and weirdest phenomena in the universe, and astronomers want to measure where, when, and how often it happens. We can do this because when black holes merge they shake the universe a little bit, and emit gravitational waves. Because black holes merge all over the universe, these ripples in space-time are... everywhere. How can we not just detect them, but disentangle them? It turns out we can use the entire galaxy as a gravitational wave detector! We use the properties of pulsars, which are the spinning cores of dead stars located all around the Milky Way, to measure echoes of merging black holes across cosmic time. Using this technique to unravel the cosmic melody of black holes will help us learn all about galaxy and black hole evolution, and it's also really awesome.

Jillian Bellovary is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York - Queensborough Community College, a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and the founder and director of the CUNY Masters in Astrophysics bridge program. She uses cosmological simulations to study black hole formation and evolution, focusing on predicting the detection of intermediate mass black holes with gravitational waves. Jillian is well known in the field for mentoring a small army of community college students, always asking about off-center black holes, and knitting during talks. In her free time she plays roller derby.

Gravitational Waves Image credit: Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav.

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