144,063 views
Lecture by Dr. Miguel Alcubierre Moya, researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences - UNAM, at the Academic Forum of CFATA UNAM Juriquilla campus. June 4, 2024. Note: Due to technical problems with the transmission, the presentation made to our audience of Dr. Alcubierre's academic career was lost, as well as the audio of the first 15 seconds of his presentation. We apologize for this omission. Summary: The theory of general relativity was postulated by Albert Einstein in late 1915. One of its main predictions is gravitational waves, disturbances in space-time that travel at the speed of light and are produced by violent astrophysical phenomena, such as supernova explosions or black hole collisions. However, gravitational waves are so weak that it took more than 100 years to detect them. Their first detection occurred in September 2015 by the LIGO observatory, and was the product of the collision of two black holes. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three people who made decisive contributions to the LIGO project. To date, there have been 10 confirmed detections of black hole collisions, and more than 20 new candidates are yet to be confirmed. At the end of 2017, the first detection of the collision of two neutron stars was announced, and this time for the first time there was a simultaneous detection of a gamma-ray flash, as well as subsequent observations across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the concept of gravitational waves, as well as the exciting results related to the first detections and the Nobel Prize.