On October 25th, Dr. Ana Caramete was invited to give a talk about black holes, gravity, the space-time continuum, gravitational waves… or in other words, to give a taste of all the LISA Space Mission related goodies. To whom you may ask? To all the curious students from Cuza Voda High School who were incredibly eager to learn all about the most trending Astrophysics wonders. 

Ana exemplified how gravitational waves are formed using a simulator consisting of a stretchy fabric (which represented the space-time continuum)  on which she accelerated two heavy balls (representing two massive objects) and recorded the formed waveforms on a computer. And that’s not all! Once a gravitational wave would have been detected, the computer would emit an allert just like the low-latency pipeline alert system will do for the data collected by the LISA Space Mission!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the demonstration, students generated their own gravitational waves which you can also see here!