Black Holes and Bangs

Space itself is wobbly. We exist on a choppy sea, its surface roiled by disturbances caused by the movements of black holes hundreds of millions of light-years away. The recent detection of these ‘gravitational waves’ by a completely novel type of observatory is a story of scientific persistence and precision engineering, resulting in a completely new way of looking at the cosmos. The lecture highlights results from the last year of observations, discuss the nature of black holes – the most mysterious of astronomical objects – and explain how the gold in your jewellery was made.