Photo: Supplied
A team led by Professor Renate Meyer from the University of Auckland has received $3 million from the Marsden Fund to further their project deciphering gravitational waves - ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic phenomena such as exploding stars. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1916, but weren’t directly measured until almost 100 years later.
Professor Meyer and her interdisciplinary team are part of an international project working towards the launch of a Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) in 2034. From space, LISA will measure low frequency gravitational waves, increasing the potential for discovering the aspects of the universe that are invisible by other means, like black holes and neutron stars.
Professor Meyer is an applied Bayesian statistician and chair of the NZ Astrostatistics and General Relativity Group.
