UCC joins international astrophysics consortium

UNIVERSITY College Cork has been granted membership of an international astrophysics consortium with official ties to the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Lisa consortium astrophysics working group is an association dedicated to developing the science and technology of the Laser Interferometer Space Antennae (Lisa), a large space mission to be launched by the ESA in the 2030s.

The mission will seek to detect gravitational waves emanating from binary stars such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes, and from massive black holes which are thousands to millions of times the mass of our sun.

UCC will be represented in the working group by Michael Tremmel, Professor Paul Callanan, and Mark Kennedy of the UCC School of Physics.

Mr Tremmel explained that the international consortium is made up of 258 member organisations across the world.

“This is a major international science endeavour that will utilise brand new technology to use gravitational waves to observe never-before-seen cosmic events such as massive black hole mergers and objects like binary stars and blackholes that would otherwise be hidden to us,” he said.

Dr Tremmel added that the granting of membership is a recognition of UCC’s world-leading work that is directly relevant for Lisa science, giving the UCC group the ability to provide the consortium with much-needed data that will help inform the mission’s science goal.