A NEW ERA FOR ASTROPHYSICS
A fictional image of a black hole (Photo: Scientific Computing World) A new era for astrophysics is just about to begin: “Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA ), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working in collaboration with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory ( LIGO ) have observed gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime – for the second time. The NCSA’s role in this project is to create gravitational wave source models and accelerate the analysis of the data created by the LIGO observation runs. Ed Seidel, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said: ‘NCSA is at the forefront of the most ambitious projects in multi-messenger astronomy that are already revolutionising our understanding of the Universe. With NCSA now officially a member of the LIGO consortium, we expect to be ha...