program5/26
Posted by Guy Van der Werf
This week's program: Astronomers explain significance of gravity waves
Irene and Stephen Little, astronomers, will speak at the Rotary Club of Estes Park on Thursday, May 26, at their regular noon meeting. They will discuss the detection of gravity waves and their importance.
Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1916, has been checked against observations many, many times and has always been confirmed to be the correct description of reality. The prediction of the existence of black holes was an early prediction from general relativity, but required more than 50 years to be verified.
Likewise, gravity waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) were predicted by relativity as well. The detection of an orbiting pair of neutron stars and the subsequent slight decay of these orbits provided an indirect verification of gravity waves in the 1970’s. Efforts to detect gravity waves on earth were unsuccessful until this year, when a large consortium of scientists succeeded in simultaneous detection of gravity waves with the LIGO detectors in Washington State and Louisiana.
Irene Little received her PhD in Astrophysics from Indiana University. Since receiving her doctorate, she has taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and at CU Boulder. She has published about 60 articles in scientific journals and given talks at several international meetings. She specialized in red giant stars, especially their atmospheres and surrounding gas envelopes. Stephen Little received his PhD in Astronomy from UCLA. He also taught at Wellesley College and Bentley University in Massachusetts and at CU Boulder. He specialized in the atmospheres of hot stars until he met Irene, when he switched to cool stars.
They have both made numerous trips to Kitt Peak near Tucson, AZ for observations, and later made use of satellite observations for their research. They were involved in setting up the Estes Park Memorial Observatory and ran (with ranger Jeff Maugans) an observing program in RMNP for 20 years.
Since retirement, they have been interested in Archaeoastronomy, the study of ancient cultures’ interest in Astronomy. They have studied the astronomical alignments of the ruins left by the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners area. In addition, they are interested in the petroglyphs and pictographs left by the ancient peoples of the Four Corners area. Currently they divide their time between Green Valley, AZ and Estes Park.