Research interests of Ian Jones, Gravity Group, University of Southmapton
         

Gravitational Wave Astronomy and Neutron Stars

Overview and motivation

Most of my work is in the new and exciting field of gravitational wave astronomy.  The key idea is that whenever something violent happens in outer space, such as a star exploding or two black holes colliding, small ripples in their gravitational field propagate outwards, travelling at the speed of light. These ripples are known as gravitational waves. Just as astronomers use telescopes to study light waves and so learn about the Universe, so we gravitational wave astronomers hope to use gravity waves to probe nature too. To detect these waves, a network of special gravitational wave detectors has been built. We will hopefully see the first gravitational waves within a few years. However, in order to understand how to use these waves to learn about the objects that produced them, we need to understand these objects as fully as possible. This is what motivates my research: I apply the laws of physics to potential gravitational wave sources, in the hope that soon I will be able to compare my predictions for gravitational waves with those detected. In so doing, I hope to learn about the far-away gravitational wave sources, and answer questions that conventional light-based astronomy could never address.

Of all the possible astronomical objects that might produce detectable gravitational waves, I'm most interested in neutron stars.  These are small dense cores left behind by some normal stars when they die, containing a mass greater than that of our Sun in a ball of radius about 10 kilometers.  As the name suggests, these  stars are made up mainly of the elementary particle known as the neutron, although there will be smaller numbers of many other particles present too.  These stars have strong gravitational fields and rotate very rapidly - making them excellent candidates for detection.