The 2026 Tannahill Lecture takes place at 7:30 pm on Thursday 15th January 2026 in Room 6.41, James Weir Building, University of Strathclyde.
This month we are very happy to welcome Professor Martin Hendry, Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology School of Physics & Astronomy University of Glasgow who will be delivering our annual Thomas Tannahill Lecture.
Gold in the Stars: the Exciting Dawn, and Future Promise, of Multi-Messenger Astronomy
Just over ten years ago saw the first detection of gravitational waves, a discovery awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for physics. In the decade since, hundreds of gravitational-wave sources have been detected – most from the collisions and mergers of black holes, many of them billions of light years distant – and an exciting new window on the Universe has been opened. To date, however, only one event has been observed in both gravity and light: a binary neutron star collision detected in August 2017.
This spectacular “multi-messenger” discovery has brought new insights to many fundamental questions: from the speed of gravity and the expansion of the universe to the nature of extreme matter and the origin of precious metals in the Universe. Join Glasgow University astronomer Martin Hendry on a whistle-stop tour of the last decade of multi-messenger astronomy and the exciting prospects that lie ahead with the next generations of ground- and spaceborne gravitational-wave detectors and telescopes.
Biography:
Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Clerk of Senate and Vice Principal of the University and was previously Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. Martin is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration: the global team of more than 1500 scientists who, with their colleagues in the Virgo Collaboration, made the first ever detection of gravitational waves. He is a Fellow (and previous Scotland Chair) of the Institute of Physics and is also a Fellow, and currently Vice-President, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh – Scotland’s National Academy.