Dr. Emanuele Berti was elected to the Chair line of the American Physical Society’s Topical Group in Gravitation in February 2016.
Dr. Berti will serve as Vice Chair this year, Chair Elect in year two, and Chair in the year three. The membership of the Topical Group in Gravitation has recently grown, and the Topical Group will soon become the Division of Gravitation.
Dr. Marco Cavaglià, Dr. Katherine Dooley and fellow scientists with LIGO detected gravitational waves from black holes.
On September 14, 2015 at 03:50:45 a.m. CST the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal. The signal matches the prediction of general relativity for the coalescence of two black holes with the mass of about 30 Suns into a single black hole at a distance of over one billion light years from Earth. This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-lKUYbhk5_4
UM’s LIGO Team announces the first detection of gravitational waves
Dr. Emanuele Berti was selected for NASA’s L3 Study Team (January 21, 2016).
The purpose of the L3 Study is to understand how NASA might participate in ESA’s L3 gravitational wave mission, to inform NASA’s engagement through the mission’s earliest stages, and to prepare for the 2020 decadal survey.
The 2015 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.
Dr. Emanuele Berti was selected as a fellow of the American Physical Society (September 2015).
Emanuele Berti, UM associate professor of physics and astronomy, was awarded the prestigious honor during the society’s annual fall meeting in September. The citation acknowledges Berti “for important contributions to theoretical gravitational-wave physics, including quasi-normal modes of black holes, tests of alternative theories, the links between analytic and numerical relativity, and the astrophysics of merging black holes.”