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.