The Institute of Space Sciences is taking part in the International Symposium of the LISA Mission Collaboration, the first space-based gravitational wave observatory, to be built and launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) is directly involved and has been supporting Romanian participation in the LISA Mission Consortium ever since the beginning and the Institute of Space Sciences is a member of the collaboration since 2018.

The LISA Mission will be capable of detecting gravitational waves produced by ultra-compact binary systems, such as black holes or neutron stars.

The 13th International Symposium of the LISA Mission Collaboration is taking place between September 1– 3, 2020.

The International LISA Symposium is the largest meeting of the collaboration and takes place every two years. This year’s edition will be held online and will consist of pre-recorded presentations as well as live presentations. The conference is free of charge and open to the general public.

Most of the pre-recorded talks are already available here.

The presentations will be both of general interest (on subjects such as the study of gravitational waves, the progress of the LISA Mission, the current activities carried out within the consortium or news about the ground-based gravitational waves observations) and of specific subjects, such as data reduction and analysis, multi-messenger astrophysics, gravitational wave observations, etc., in dedicated sessions. There will also be sessions about the hardware and instrument of the Mission. Last but not least, as the Mission consortium places special emphasis on education and dissemination and on the involvement of young people in LISA activities, there will be a session dedicated to this topic.

Two of the members of the LISA Collaboration working as scientists at the Institute of Space Sciences (ISS), will present the activities of the ISS-Sci group within the Mission in two pre-recorded presentations: Ana Caramete in the Scientific Algorithms section and Răzvan Balaşov in the Supermassive Black Holes / Galactic Evolution section.

Details of how the symposium will function may be found at this link.

Image credit: ESA–C.Carreau