The Multimessenger Gold Rush: Prospecting for the Origin of the Heavy Elements Using Gravity and Light - Dave Coulter
The most extreme events in the universe are collisions between two black holes, two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole. These objects are so massive, and the collisions so energetic, that they physically stretch space and time in the form of gravitational waves and can be detected billions of light-years away. However, this gravitational radiation is invisible to our eyes, and my research centers around searching for, and characterizing, the optical light associated with these titanic collisions. In 2017 our team at UC Santa Cruz did just that and found the first and only such optical counterpart to a gravitational wave source to date. In this talk, I will share the story of this discovery, the insights that it unlocked into the decades-long mystery of how and where the heaviest elements like gold and platinum are synthesized in the Universe, and our plans looking forward to the next observational run of LIGO -- a literal and figurative scientific gold rush!
Dave graduated with a B.A. in History from Lewis & Clark College in 2003 and immediately took a left turn and taught himself how to program computers to land a job as a software engineer. Working as an engineer by day, Dave earned a B.S. at night in Physics from Portland State University in 2015 and spent summers as an intern at NASA. There he studied topics as diverse as ocean biodiversity to the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Dave joined the department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UCSC in 2016, and in his first year earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Dave specializes in searching for the visible-light counterparts to gravitational wave sources and was a critical part of the team that discovered the first-ever such counterpart in 2017: a "kilonova" created by the merger of two neutron stars. This discovery was featured on the cover of Science Magazine as the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year and continues to have an enormous impact on the field.