Annual Jo Cline Astronomy Lecture to Feature Dr. Gabriela González

Dr. Gabriela González, a physicist working on the discovery of gravitational waves with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration team, will present the annual Jo Cline Astronomy Lecture on Sept. 21.

JAMESTOWN, N.C.  — Guilford Technical Community College’s Cline Observatory and the GTCC Foundation will present a free lecture, “Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes and Other Matters” by Dr. Gabriela González.

The annual Jo Cline Astronomy Lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 21 in the Joseph S. Koury Auditorium on GTCC’s Jamestown Campus. Following the lecture, Cline Observatory will be open for viewing – weather permitting. Both events are free and open to the public.

Dr. González is a physicist working on the discovery of gravitational waves with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) team and has been a member of the team since its founding in 1997. She served as the public spokesperson for LSC from 2011-2017, including the announcement of LIGO’s first detections of gravitational wave events.

Born in Córdoba, Argentina, Dr. González studied physics at the University of Córdoba and earned her Ph.D. at Syracuse University. She worked as a staff scientist in the LIGO group at MIT until 1997 before joining the faculty at Penn State. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University. Her work is focused on LIGO instrument development and LIGO data calibration and diagnostics, which are critical to increasing the astrophysical reach of data analysis methods.

She has received awards from the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Cline Observatory and the GTCC Foundation offers a free public lecture each fall by a notable astronomical researcher. The first lecture was given at the observatory’s dedication by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill astronomer Bruce Carney. Since then, the observatory has continued to bring some of the top researchers in the field to GTCC to share the wonders of the cosmos. Topics have spanned the universe, from the solar system to the galaxies, to great observatories and cosmology.

In her lecture, “Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes and Other Matters,” Dr. González will present the history and details of gravitational wave observations and the gravity-bright future of the field.

On Sept. 14, 2015, the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana registered for the first time ever a loud gravitational wave signal traveling through Earth. The wave was created more than a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes. Several other gravitational waves from black holes were detected, including one by LIGO and the Virgo detector in Europe, produced by two neutron stars giving birth to a black hole and generating electromagnetic waves detected by many telescopes. 

For more information about the Cline Observatory, contact Tom English, director of the Cline Observatory, at (336) 334-4822, ext. 50023 or trenglish@gtcc.edu or visit http://observatory.gtcc.edu.

Guilford Technical Community College’s Cline Observatory offers a free public lecture by a notable astronomical researcher each fall. The fall lecture is dedicated to the memory of Jo Cline who passed away in 2015. Jo and her husband Don were instrumental in making the Cline Observatory and its programs possible. They could always be found in the front row of all the astronomy lectures.