Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, produced when the super-dense remnants of dead stars collide. They are our only direct window into the interiors of neutron stars: objects whose centers are a soup of quarks and gluons, almost identical to the Universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. They also give us an independent way to measure how fast the Universe is expanding, and can tell us how stars live and die across cosmic time.
Gravitational waves are incredibly faint and hard to detect. Dr Fiona Panther uses Bayesian inference, supercomputers and signal processing techniques to find new, better ways of searching for gravitational waves and light associated with black hole and neutron star collisions. She studies how we can use them to measure the fundamental properties of the Universe.
Dr Panther uses gravitational waves and light to study how neutron stars and black holes form and evolve, and what they can tell us about how our Universe is changing over cosmic time. As a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, she has developed software for the real-time detection of gravitational waves, and coordinated analyses of gravitational wave events that have potential electromagnetic counterparts as the co-chair of the Electromagnetic Counterpart Claim Taskforce. She was a key member of the team that identified the first potential coincidence between a fast radio burst and a neutron star merger, identifying and characterizing the galaxy that the fast radio burst originated from. She has developed new statistical methods that use gravitational waves to measure the maximum mass a neutron star can achieve before it collapses to become a black hole. Her current work focuses on how we can measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe using gravitational waves, aiming to solve an almost 30 year debate about just how fast this accelerated expansion is. Dr Panther is also interested in how we can apply the computer algorithms we use to study gravitational waves to other problems. She is now working on applying her knowledge beyond astrophysics, including using electroencephalograms to create objective diagnostic criteria for neurological problems, and understanding how seismic waves cause the ground to vibrate and tilt.